Starship Krupa

Perhaps, but with software such as DAW software, there are very real concerns that go along with subscription-only. First and foremost, being able to use the software in case of financial emergency, failure of the manufacturer, whatever. It's been repeated endlessly that "subscription model is the future," but I look around and still, to this day, the only DAW's that have no perpetual option are Audition, Sonar, and Next. There are more DAW's that offer no subscription option than there are ones that offer no perpetual option. That's not speculation or prediction, it is how things actually are. I think that best way for a DAW manufacturer who wants to get people on a subscription/membership plan is to do as at least one popular DAW manufacturer is doing and offer a "hybrid" license, where after the user has paid for a year of subscription fees, if they choose to drop the subscription they get a license for the software in whatever release it was when they stopped. This allows the publisher to expose users of the software to the benefits of membership while easing the users' fears of not being able to work on their projects if they should find themselves unable to keep a subscription current. No they're not. Strict license enforcement is the result of piracy. If someone's going to pirate software, it's no more difficult to pirate a subscription-licensed program than a perpetual-licensed one. If someone is going to crack your licensing scheme, they will do it one way or the other. The reason publishers like subscriptions, and it's a very good reason, is that they represent stable cash flow. For software that is perpetual-only, if the publisher is going to keep getting paid, they need to keep selling both new licenses and upgrade licenses. That can have an unfortunate effect on software quality when developer hours are dedicated to feature expansion at the expense of bug fixing. I believe that SONAR had suffered from that at the time that BandLab acquired it. Sure, who doesn't love new features, but longtime users are more likely to want the existing features to work correctly than they are to want new features. The kind of things that faithful users want, which is bug fixes, tuning of existing performance, and refining of existing features, just don't sell licenses. So how do you get paid? Steady guaranteed flow of cash from the userbase is the best way. The banks and analysts love nothing better than a steady flow of cash. And that's fine, nobody has a problem with that, but people want to know that in the event of a catastrophe, which as we know, veteran Sonar users are not strangers to, they'll be able to keep using the tool(s) they've invested so much money and time into. I don't believe that the permanent license for people who fork out for a year's subscription fees would cannibalize subscription sales. If someone is enough of a loyal user that they'll pay for a year of it, and if the subscription/membership services are actually useful, they'll keep paying for it to get the new features, both large and small. If they're the sort that just refuses to pay software subscription fees out of principle or whatever, they're not going to get a subscription just because there's no other license option. They'll switch to a DAW that offers the kind of license they prefer. People in their first year of a hybrid plan may even start digging the extra benefits of membership as well, the music publishing stuff and all that. Heck, they may even understand that continuing to pay their membership dues is the best way to keep the program they love alive. They just need to know that if they run out of money, or the DAW ceases sales and development (in the case of SONAR, again), they won't be left with nothing. That's really all there is to it. So here's hoping that BandLab will eventually offer a hybrid licensing plan for Sonar. I think it would be a win for all.

Verily. The dev team are chefs, Ashwin is waitstaff. Neither have the ability to do anything about what or how restaurant customers pay for their meal except relay customers' preferences to management. Management have many other restaurants to manage. Maybe to them, NuSonar is the fresh baked bread that comes with a meal. You can't go into the restaurant and only order the bread. Whatever else, diners may not shout the names of other restaurants in the dining room.😉

One troubleshooting test to either confirm or eliminate the external preamp from the equation would be to run a cable directly to your interface, using its built-in preamp instead of the WA. If you do that and the ringing goes away, you've narrowed down the possible causes considerably. If it doesn't, it ain't the WA.

1/4" patch cables come in 2 flavors. There's unbalanced, which is 1 conductor with shield/ground, and balanced, which is 2 conductors with shield/ground. The way to tell them apart is to look at the plugs. Unbalanced will have only tip and sleeve contacts, whereas balanced will add a ring contact. Depending on how far your interface is from the monitors, there may be little advantage to using TRS balanced cables. There can be less 60 (or 50, depending on where in the world you are) cycle hum with balanced cables, but that's for runs of a meter or more.

Duplicate.

Wow, I'm checking out Stars of the Lid and they had my heart aching from the first...bar? Do we have "bars" in this kind of ambient?😄 First loop, maybe? And then they fade into a sample of their doggy whining....this is soul music. @jkoseattle, I can see why you find them inspiring. It sounds like they're doing long looping using synths and sampled string instruments. I also use movie and TV dialog samples, as did SotL. A problem that I ran into was that my samples were too good. As in crystal clear, sampled via loopback from Netflix from their original Pro Tool'd expensive mic'd studio perfection. My favorite tool for dustying up samples is XLN's RC-20. It's kind of the "industry standard" for that sort of thing. Cymatics' Origin is a free tool that has a subset of RC-20's feature set. If you want to stick with free, it's probably the best of the freeware that does what it does. iZotope Vinyl is also good. I picked up RC-20 on sale for $39.95. That looks like a lot of money for what is for me a single-use effect that I could probably achieve by stringing a few of my huge toolbox of plug-ins together, but I made the "mistake" of trying a demo, and it got me where I wanted to go so quickly and easily that I knew it would be worth it.

As @David Baay said, he and I recently spent some time exploring exactly how Workspaces, um, work. He asked a similar question to yours in a different forum. I wanted to help out and I wanted to sort some of his questions for myself. When I work on a project, I can get crazy with opening windows and moving them to my second monitor and so on, and sometimes I want a way to snap back to my default layout. This is what we learned: It's a feature with two basic uses. One of the uses is to remove UI elements that the user may find distracting. I never use that, because I know how to just close things that I don't need to see. That feature is the box on the left when you open the Manage Workspaces dialog. Some must find it useful because the 6.5 update to Studio One introduced a similar feature, obviously inspired by Cakewalk. The other part of the feature, the one that I find useful, lets you apply Control Bar Layout, Window Layout, Track Control Manager settings, Keyboard shortcut settings, and Display options that are set in Preferences. Some things to understand about this feature is that most of the the "Load From Workspace" settings, are also loaded from projects (and templates). So the easiest way to get where you want to go would be just to make a template (or templates) with all of the settings you listed and open that template when you start a new project. The Workspaces feature allows you to save these settings, and apply them to projects that you've already opened. So, for instance, you've been working on a project and you've made a bunch of changes to the window layout, you've got the Multidock open to show Step Sequencer, etc. and you want to switch to a layout where you're using Console View for mixing. That's when you load a Workspace. And David's correct when he says that it's best not to set Apply Workspace on Project Load unless you want to reset all those things every time you open a project or template. That's the part of Workspaces that makes them scary. You've set up a project just how you want it, you save it, and then when you open it, your workspace gets applied and you lose all of your options. To sum it up, you don't need to use the Workspaces feature to do what you want to do. Just make some templates with those settings the way you want them and load them when you start a new project and you'll be fine. The stock templates will reset the track controls and window layout, which is what you're struggling with, so either modify them or create your own. One of the slickest features of NuSonar is the ability to resize Console strips, and that also gets saved with projects and window layouts. Footnotes: 1. if you want to save project-specific window layouts once you get rolling with a project, maybe get cozy with Screensets. While David and I were shaking out Workspaces, I got to know them because I thought they might apply to his situation. I understand how they work, but haven't made them part of my workflow. 2. "None" is actually a workspace that gets saved when you load a named workspace. It's your safety net. If you get into trouble when applying a Workspace, go back to None and it will put your settings back to whatever they were before you applied the workspace. It's also a good idea to save your preferred options as a "Bronxio's" workspace so that if you forget that you have "Apply Workspace on Project Load" checked, you can revert back to it more easily. Good luck and let us know once you have a handle on it.

I agree. There have been people requesting it from the start of NuSonar. If there is resistance from TPTB, I don't understand why. Did it cause some kind of trouble back when CbB allowed us to not only set custom colors using theming, the custom colors in Preferences also worked on a lot of elements. The only side effect for me was that I could read everything better once I got a set of colors dialed in. I never hurt anyone with it.

For a feature to be added, it must first be requested, and the place to do that is in the Feedback forum.

It's not. So many stories of his jerk behavior have come out and it's harder for me to separate that from the art when it's a lyricist who writes a lot about the interpersonal. I can shrug off Eddie Van Halen's legendary jerkdom because his music doesn't require letting it in close to my heart. It's just kick-***** rock 'n' roll, and as such, who cares if the people making it made life miserable for those around them. Part of Simon's genius is that his music invites you to get close, to empathize with the singer(s). With music like that, if I know that the people creating it are jerks, it interferes.

Wow, @Sal Sorice, my mind can't shake the idea of "Ticking" being a Sidney Lumet picture. Guy who was bullied in school comes home from....maybe military service. He visits the neighborhood bar and grill because he hears that one of the few people he got along with, a black kid, is waiting tables there. The old crew who used to push him around shows up. Things go downhill, he pulls a knife. His friend tries to get it away from him, somehow gets stabbed. He remembers that the club owner used to keep his WWII service weapon underneath the till in case of robbery. Taupin fit a 2 hour movie into a 7-minute song.

Whoa, hadn't listened to that one in decades, forgot how great it was. Thanks for mentioning it. Caribou came out at the height of my appreciation for Elton John. 50 years ago, the hidden-in-plain-sight clue of "grow up straight and true blue" sailed right over my head. Adds more poignancy and clarity to the mystery of what triggered the tragedy. Now the picture it paints of this kid maybe just trying to have a beer in peace at a blue collar bar and maybe getting shoved around for his mannerisms....the story is more complete.

It's nice to think that they'd just sand the offending logo off and do something useful with them, but I don't think that's how it works. Unless there's some mechanism for Customs and Border Protection to be an agency that sells things, and I doubt that there is, it's going to be disposal for these musical instruments. I'm with those who say these no doubt playable instruments shouldn't have Gibson's trademarked logo on them at all. First off, and I know that as an aficionado of oddball guitars I am probably not neurotypical regarding these matters, I would not wish to own or play a guitar with Gibson's or Fender's logo on the headstock that wasn't made and sold by Gibson or Fender. I don't understand the appeal. I have a defiant punk attitude toward brand worship. And I've never wanted to play the same kind of guitar that everyone else is using. Give me something that's shaped like a 335 or a Strat but says Aria or Behringer on the headstock and I'm fine. Better still, give me something that's not shaped like a common guitar but plays and sounds great and I'm even happier. I felt this way almost from the start of my desire to play guitar back in the mid 70's. The axe I wanted was an Ovation Viper (which I eventually did own) or Fender Musicmaster (ditto). My first good instrument was a Hofner Club Bass like Tina Weymouth played in Talking Heads. The second was a (maligned at the time) non-reverse Gibson Firebird with (maligned at the time) P-90's. When I had to sell these instruments to get cash, I refrained from selling the Firebird to a guy who wanted to rip the P-90's out and put in humbuckers, as was the custom at the time. Nobody cares about the logo on the headstock but some musicians and guitar aficionados. If I'm playing in front of people and get a good sound with my plywood Behringer, anyone who knows anything about guitars is going to think "wow, he's getting such a good sound from that cheapo Behringer." If I'm getting a just okay sound out of a copy guitar with a Gibson logo on it, is anyone going to look at it and think "sounds okay, but wowee a GIBSON?" Moreover, the existence of counterfeit major brand guitars actually leads to guitar heads wondering if maybe you're playing a fake. Nobody is going to suspect that my beloved Peavey Foundation Bass is a fake because nobody would fake a Peavey. But they might squint at a sunburst Les Paul wondering if I'm actually playing a real one. The only context I can think of where it might be appropriate would be in a tribute band where you don't want to risk taking your real sunburst Les Paul out of the house.

I actually like the drum grid view. It's setting it up and keeping it set up that harshes my mellow. Thanks to the advice and encouragement given by some of the people in this topic, that seems to be more often now. I've learned better when it requires a chicken sacrifice rather than a goat, etc. I ain't hatin', I think it's a fine editing paradigm, one that not all other DAW's have. If the drum grid was poop, I'd forget about it and wouldn't whinge about how tricky it is to get it to work.

Well done. Now the thing to do is to sit down with a project with some audio or sequenced notes and run through a few presets in each of the 38. I should have done this sooner than I did. Anyone who does this is guaranteed some "holy crap I didn't know it could do this" moments. And we should all get the most we can from our tools, right? It's not a collection of simple "does what it says on the tin" FX as you might expect from something they let people use for free. As is customary with MeldaProduction, what you see on the front panel is the tip of an iceberg. You have a "tuner" that is polyphonic and also a realtime pitch-to-MIDI converter. You have a spectrum analyzer that lets you call up analysis profiles from different genres to compare with your song's overall balance. You have an EQ that lets you apply each band's settings to harmonics of the center frequency (great for taming cymbal pings). You have a compressor that lets you create custom compression or expansion curves using spline curves. They all share some features like the ability to analyze the level of incoming audio and adjust their output level to match it so that your ears are less likely to get fooled. I don't usually talk about it much, but with the bundle upgrade, the audio processors let you combine parameters within each plug-in, so that for instance you can make a single control that adjusts both filter Q and frequency at the same time. And then automate it. That's what the "multiparameter" system is. Some of them will now also let you modulate any parameter(s) you want. If the upgraded plug-in has that feature, you can choose any parameter (or multiparameter) and control it with an LFO, triggered ADSR, MIDI CC, or follower, where the parameter will change in response to input level. There's built-in oversampling, with separate settings for playback and render. Very importantly for those who think the stock UI's are frumpy, you can change theme (text, control style) and color. I switch to Argon theme and have my own custom color set that I exported and apply to all of the plug-ins. The Online Preset Exchange will let you download presets that other users have created. Unfortunately, a lot of rubbish presets got uploaded years ago when they were trying to encourage use of the feature, but (especially with MAnalyzer, MLoudnessAnalyzer, MRhythmizer and the synths) there are some gems. I think the Preset Exchange is an overlooked feature with a lot of unused potential. Upgraded or not, all of them are able to process in LR mode, MS mode, and left or right or mid or side only (and separately). So anything that affects stereo imaging can be switched so that whatever differences were being induced between left and right would now be differences between mid and side. This can make for some....interesting psychoacoustic effects and is one of my favorite tricks. Late in the v. 16 release cycle, they quietly introduced "machine learning" which means that you can choose a parameter (or multiple parameters, or combined parameters) and have the plug-in analyze the file and somehow adjust the parameter(s) based on what's in the file. I don't understand how this works at all, but welcome to the land of MeldaProduction, where there are always features that you ignore because you don't understand what they do or how to use them. There are only so many hours in a day, days in a week, years in a life, etc. and at least for now I will opt out of figuring out how my flanger settings might benefit from "machine learning." But it's there if I ever get bored with everything else and want to mess with it.🙄

You might look into BandLab. The platform is built for that sort of thing.

Nice! There's a geek-out brewing here.😊 I'm into that kinda stuff, too. Not yet familiar with Biosphere and Stars of the Lid, but am checking them out now. It's a genre that's deliberately less about personae, so it can be hard to keep track of individual artists. I have a Google Keep page open all the time on my computers so that I can write down the names of songs and artists. Where are you listening to it? I have some favorite labels and streaming stations. 9128.live is the streaming station for A Strangely Isolated Place Records and always has good stuff. Soma.fm's Deep Space One, Synphaera, and n5MD channels are good for inspiration. Also Drone Zone for the hardcore stuff. I like some pulse and glitch thrown in, but sometimes, full on drone is my jam. There are some instruments, freeware even, that I think will get you started. My first piece of advice is to go immediately to Soundpaint and download their sampler/player and all of the free libraries. Adastra Ambiences and Free ASMR are particularly good, but all of them are useful. The engineers and sound designers are fans of ambient drone and their products are great for producers of such. Even if I hadn't gotten them for free, I'd consider their stuff to be the absolute top of the heap. I did purchase a library. IMO, you could get going and do some great stuff with just what Soundpaint offers for free, but of course, there's plenty more out there. Somerville Sounds Prototypes are great, especially Antiquarian Echoes. For Kontakt (and Kontakt Player), there are gems in Fracture Sounds Blueprint Collection. Specifically Gentle Strings and Feedback Guitar, but listen to them all, they're free. Westwood Instruments Roots Series has some goodies, I especially like Untold Strings. Quiet Music have some freebies I've found useful. Sample Science have a lot of stuff, I'd say their best freebie for ambient is Abstract Crystal Pads. Elektronik Soundlabs has the classic Atmos 2. Don't know why it's no longer on their website, but they have other things like Padscape Lite and Arctic Dreams Lite. Last but in no way least, A|A|S Swatches includes over 750 sounds, many of them pads and atmospheres from their Chromaphone, Ultra Analog VA-3, and String Studio VS-3 synths. These are some of the classiest sounds around. For processing and rolling your own, there are plenty of FX that you can use to take your favorite sounds and warp/mold them into ambient instruments. As @rsinger said, long delay as used by, Eno and Fripp, who picked it up from Terry Riley, was one of the starting points. Long delay with just a tiny modulation of the delay time is one of my favorite tricks, and one you can do with the Sonitus delay, or really, almost any delay. Try taking some of your sustained orchestral sounds like strings, wind, and brass ensembles and running them through Valhalla Supermassive. Unplug.Red's CRMBL is a favorite free pitch shifting delay. Glitchmachines' Fracture and Hysteresis are great for adding some texture. Of course, this is just what you can get for free, my favorite plug-in houses for oddball FX are Glitchmachines, Unfiltered Audio, and Freakshow Industries. I have licenses for most of their products. That should be enough to get you started. When creating ambient music, I find that timbre is a hugely important element for carrying the feelings and intent. I call up a favorite instrument, usually one of the ones on this list, then start browsing patches and seeing if a timbre inspires something. Let my fingers wander. There's as much "discovery" in it, if not more, than there is "creation," if you get me. Rather than hearing a sound in my head and using my musical tools to bring it to life, I find myself listening for what the timbre has to say and then directing or molding it. Other times, I'll come up with some changes on piano and then go in search of the perfect timbre for them. It's so much fun, like playing in the sandbox was when I was a kiddo. Please let me know what you think of my suggestions. Also, maybe we could take this to the Production Techniques forum now that you have more tools?

This, along with smaller font sizes for text in multiple places, is my number one gripe about Sonar. Close behind is the invisibility of the Aim Assist line in PRV in the light schemes. I like the new look, now when I open Cakewalk by BandLab, even with one of my own custom themes, it looks clunky by comparison. I spent many hours creating Cakewalk themes and I'm fine with no longer being able to use them. Sonar just looks so much slicker. But those damn measure and beat lines! It was great when we had control over them via the custom colors preference. Mine were very contrast-y, red on a dark background. Now I can barely distinguish them, I have to use the Aim Assist line and the ruler to try to line things up, and sometimes I miss by whatever the smallest snap size is and don't realize it until playback reveals that it's not in time. So trying to line it up visually has failed in that case and I have to rely on another sense. I've asked, begged even. I don't understand why the feature was removed and I don't understand why it still hasn't been restored. I don't recall that people ever got into trouble due to changing the color of their grid lines. Thanks for speaking up about it.

www.badcaps.net If it was built in the mid-to-late 00's it probably finally succumbed to what I call "cap cooties." Back then there was a manufacturing debacle that resulted in many millions of electrolytic capacitors being manufactured with a bad formula. Supposedly one company's formula for dielectric goop was stolen and widely distributed, but it was the wrong formula. Whether this one company deliberately put the bad formula out there knowing that their competitors would copy it remains unknown. But the result was that a lot of devices were made with electrolytic caps that will fail within a few short years. I've lost count of the number of devices I've repaired just by replacing electrolytic caps from this era. Multiple large TV's and monitors bought for peanuts on CL because they would only power up intermittently, network switches, a PreSonus Firebox, even a few Fender Hot Rod Deluxes. It's always in the power supply, because those are the caps that take the worst beating. But chances are you can either replace half a dozen electrolytics on the PS board with Mouser or eBay caps, or find a rebuilt board on eBay and get decades more use out of your 42" monitor.

I knew it had to be something to do with caching or pre-loading! Thanks for posting the solution once you figured it out.

Works in NuSonar on my system. You have to click on the ProChannel button up at the top of the Inspector to see it:

Yes, he/I did mention that, but at the time, I hadn't tried it in years because I don't use external drum modules. And it doesn't seem I can get it to work with soft synths. I since sorted it out and can use that display if I want, but since I can only get it to work when mapped to an external port, it's not really useful.

Hmm. I haven't tried to do this in years, and now I can't remember exactly what steps I did that ended up with the colored diamonds. I'm sure I saw a third drum editing display type, it wasn't the rectangular blocks of the standard PRV or the squares-with-velocity tails of the Drum Pane. And I recall that it only showed up when I had the MIDI channel output set to 10. Can't find anything about it in the Reference Guide except a passing reference to specifying that an instrument is a drum instrument in the instrument definitions maker. I stumbled upon it by accident while flailing, but since it didn't output to a virtual drum synth, it wasn't something I could use. @Base 57, am I misremembering this? Isn't there a third display for drum editing? And I don't mean in Staff View. It was very crisp and used (green, I think) diamonds to represent drum hits. Was it something my mind conjured up out of frustration?

My Whitney pales in comparison to your Steinway B. Most of the pianos that have ever existed pale in comparison to your Steinway B.

I have asked around plenty, including a couple of nightclubs. Despite the Great Bay Area Exodus of Creative People, I still have a small network of musicians and tossed it out there. It would probably cost over a couple of hundy to move it. The harp and pinblock are in such good condition, I know the poor thing has decades of useful playing life in it. The issue is that digital pianos have gotten so good and so inexpensive. A piano teacher can bring a piano into a student's home that has great action and that never goes out of tune. They can also turn the volume down so as not to annoy the other occupants of the house. I feel like I'm trying to give away a slide rule. Or heck, even a pocket calculator. You might be required to use a dedicated calculator when taking an examination, but other than that, why would anyone own one?