Starship Krupa

Oh, that's cool, with its own fader? You can probably throw FX on there as well. That's nice, that Pro Tools is introducing a feature at 2020 Winter NAMM that Mixcraft introduced at 2016 Winter NAMM. It used to be that other DAW's imitated PT, but when was the last time that PT came out with a new feature that users of other DAW's coveted? I ask because I don't know, it's not a rhetorical question. I know they were busy for a couple of years implementing "not locking up at random and critical moments," which CbB also successfully did, but I'm not sure if they were strictly copying them or if it came out of user requests.

The Tungsten theme does have flatter buttons, and some of the many user-created themes also have flat buttons, but yes, the size of the various elements must be the same as the default theme. No resizing allowed. Resizable (vector) UI is a long-requested feature, so know the developers of Cakewalk know that many users would like it to be as you suggest. In the meantime, please avail yourself of the user-created themes. I usually run a user-created theme (slightly modified by me). I agree that Mercury, which is the current default theme, is starting to look a little dated. Tungsten is better. Given that the Theme Editor exists, I would like to see a more modern default look for Cakewalk, but such decisions are not mine to make.

I think it's cute when Pro Tools gets a feature that Cubase and Cakewalk and Digital Performer and Logic users have all been taking for granted for half a dozen years and their marketing department goes nuts and their smug users get further confirmation that PT is the greatest. I didn't watch the video, but I'm guessing that PT folders work the same way as Cakewalk folders? You can group tracks and mute, solo, arm? Collapse the folder to save real estate? The last one I saw that cracked me up was Clip Gain Automation. Pro Tools apparently only got the ability to automate gain within a clip in the previous revision and that was a HUGE DEAL. OMG THA CLIP GAINZ AUDDOMASHIONNZ BUY YOUR UPDATEZ NOWZERZ!! Even freaking little old Mixcraft has had all of those things for years. I would love for Cakewalk to handle folders the way that program does.

Confirmed, on my system, it's not a matter of monitor 1 or monitor 2. Behavior is that pinned plug-in UI's get covered up by any Cakewalk child window. In other words, they stay open, but will only stay visible on top of the Track View. If I float the Console, Piano Roll, Browser, Inspector, Synth Rack, Help, etc. and give them focus, they cover up plug-in UI's. That happens whether I have the Track View or child windows on monitor 1 or 2. I had a similar confusion to @Rod L. Short had because I usually have the Console max'd on monitor 2 during mixing and mastering. I thought my pinned plug-ins were closing. Now I know that they were buried. Thank you Rod for bringing this up. IMO they should stay on top when the Console View and Piano Roll have focus. Not sure about the other windows, but I don't undock the Browser, Synth Rack, etc. often enough for it to be an issue anyway.

Hey, a favorite freeware compressor of mine has gained some new features and is now Audio Damage Rough Rider 3. Try it on a drum bus you'd like to fatten up. Ohhhh yeah.

Good heavens, @User 905133, thank you so much for trying all these permutations and documenting them so well! It's going to take me some time to digest it, but rest assured that your work here is going to be very valuable. I'm acquainted with the people in the cadre that rhymes with "tater beam" and will alert them to this thread. From my standpoint, as to the way it "should" work, I think that first, whatever Cakewalk window the user has open, be it Track View, Console, Piano Roll, or whatever, minimized, maximized, docked, floating, on a single monitor or multiple monitors, if they have plug-in UI's open and pinned they should never wind up behind a Cakewalk window. Next, pinned plug-ins should stay open until the user closes them.

Funny thing is, at one point I had it working like that too, which is what I was used to before CbB. When I invoke something I like it to hang around until I explicitly banish it. Then at some point I started playing with the settings and switched video cards and the program went though half a dozen updates and things went sideways and I've never quite taken the time to figure out why it doesn't quite behave the way I want any more. I also want to be able to set things so that when I Replace Synth, the UI automatically opens, but that is a matter for a Feedback thread....

Charlie Daniels Band. Used to like him better when he wanted the world to "leave this long-haired country boy alone." Less a fan of his later work. (CBD is cannabidiol, an ingredient in a recreational substance that the leader of the CDB claimed to ingest in the morning)

Hit that "FX" button up at the top in the Control Bar and see if the problem goes away. If it does, you set up one or more of your FX in a weird way. Go through them and figure out what you did. Sounds like an interesting, possibly useful effect. Make note of it for possible future use. ?

No, it is past time to look for closed ear headphones. ? In the spirit of good humor, it does puzzle me when people say on forums that they are trying to salvage already-recorded tracks and then get suggestions that they use a different mic, or put a mic on the kick drum, or have the vocalist use a stand instead of hand-holding the mic....and this is when the OP has not self-identified as Time Lord nor are they in possession of any time travel device or method. I see that it's also past the time when processing suggestions would be useful for the OP, but I love the challenge of salvaging tracks. Maybe some future reader (see what I did there) can benefit. I might throw a dynamic EQ or gate at this one. First take a parametric like the Quadcurve or my favorite, MEqualizer. Dial in one of the bands to boost about 10dB. Then sweep the frequency across until the sound of the metronome click is at its most obnoxious and you've found the frequency you need to cut. You can start with trying to just cut it with the para and see if it sounds too intrusive. To get fancier, set up a dynamic eq to slap the frequency down a bit when it comes up. Another cool trick is to use something like Boz' Gatey-Watey to gate out only the frequencies you want to gate out. What, buy a $20 plug just for this? Nope, turns out that the Sonitus fx gate has this feature built right in, once you figure out what freq you want to nuke, just move the sliders, tell it how much, and set the detector. The thing is, usually while I'm playing, my guitar sound is covering up the click anyway (or it should be, ha).

It just means that the user 1. has Recycle Plug-In Windows set in Preferences and 2. clicks on the icon in the upper right corner of the plug-in UI that looks like a push-pin. If you have Recycle Plug-In Windows turned off by default, all your plug-in GUI's are "pinned" to begin with and you have to close them to get rid of them. This should have the effect of keeping all such "pinned" plug-in UI's open, but the behavior I have observed is that it only does so when the plug-in UI is open over the main window. It doesn't work over floated multidock windows. @Rod L. Short, maybe our issues are the same, and we always drag our floated windows to the second monitor! I'll try it the other way around and see which it is. IIRC, it's that the GUI's will stay open over your Track View, so please try it and we'll see.

It's possible that the custom uninstaller program is responsible for the antique version of the Visual C++ libraries. Those uninstaller programs can be a mixed bag, with the occasional baby going out with the bathwater in the case of such things as shared libraries. A few things that I have learned about AAS's software, being a big fan: First, they recently updated most of their stuff, so make sure you have the latest. Second, their installer is compliant with the Windows 10 uninstall list, so if you want to uninstall their stuff, it's all there in the Apps list in Windows Settings. Third, in my experience AAS are right behind Waves as far as strewing copies of their plug-ins all over the place. Seriously, I have wondered whether if a folder has the string "VST" in its name they just go ahead and stick a copy of their .DLL's in there. I've found copies of their plug-ins in my Cakewalk folder, my Programs folder, all over the place. 32-bit, AAX, 32-bit AAX, whatever. I don't like there to be more than one copy of a given plug-in on my system because multiple copies can cause issues with version control, so after an AAS install I go around and manually root out the extras. @Noel Borthwick, I, too, seem to now be having AAS woes in a project that previously played fine. My issue is more nebulous at the moment, so I can't chime in except to say that I'm also seeing higher resource usage with corresponding stutter and crackle in the audio output. This is on my lesser-powered i5 notebook using the onboard chip with WASAPI, not the system shown in my sig. Switching ThreadScheduling back and forth between 2 and 3 seems to result in a bit smoother operation with 2, but results are as yet inconclusive.

Always in motion is the future. If you had asked in late October 2017 about the next update of SONAR, you would have gotten all sorts of answers, probably none of which would have been "there will be no 'next' update of SONAR." On your computer you say Windows 10 itself worked correctly for a while then stopped working correctly, so who knows? People stay on Windows 7 to try to save money (and upgrade hassle) by holding on to their old computer for as long as possible before upgrading it or buying a new one. As time passes, the hassle level will continue to rise until it reaches a point at which it is more hassle to stay with Windows 7 than it would be to upgrade their system to Windows 10. The hassle comes first in the form of looming uncertainty about compatibility, later it will be in the form of incompatibility itself. How long a person wishes to hold out probably depends on their comfort level with the uncertainty until of course the wall is hit and the hardware breaks down or the software just plain won't run any more, and holding on to the old system is a false economy. Until that time: nothing is guaranteed. "Supported" means that the tech support staff and developers (including QA) will do what they can (within reason) to see to it that Cakewalk will run on any Windows 10 system that meets the spec. Also in the case of the developers, that they stay on top of the latest improvements to the way the OS deals with multimedia and use that information to make the program work better. With a supported platform you can breathe more easily. I was a Windows 7 user until last year when a Cakewalk developer said in this forum that they were no longer actively developing for that platform. I couldn't switch over fast enough once I heard that. I'm not going to be standing on the ice floe drifting away wondering why my computer programs are starting to act weird and I can't download any new ones because they need the current OS. Windows 10 didn't work as well as my very optimized Windows 7 system at first, but I spent some time and figured out why, and now I have a very optimized Windows 10 system where I can shut off realtime malware scans permanently, delay system updates for weeks at a time if I want, etc. because I learned how to control it.

I think the days of Microsoft being concerned about making money by selling individuals upgrade licenses for Windows are probably in the past. For that income, they make money from selling licenses in bulk to people who sell the OS installed on brand new computers. They let people upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost for a good while, now they've left a little loophole open, which itself is evidence that they either don't really give much of a crap or that they even would still like us all to upgrade for free, but for marketing purposes, they had to put some deadline on the program to give people a sense of urgency.

I am pretty sure that the ones that come (hidden) with Cakewalk by BandLab are the same ones that shipped with the last versions of SONAR Professional and Platinum. Can't think of why the developers would update plug-ins that are disabled by default. Thanks all for reminding me to re-enable them! I need to come up with a script, maybe a .REG or .BAT or .CMD file that will do it.

Oh, I am really happy about this!

Thank you! The second answer was the one I was looking for, except now I need to figure out why I don't get the Note Names dialog when I right click on my piano keys....

I seem to recall that when the Piano Roll View first got note names on the MIDI notes, a couple of people mentioning that it was cool that one could also get drum names to show up on the MIDI notes. I didn't get around to asking them how to accomplish this at the time, but I do so now. Is it possible to get individual drum instrument names to show up on the MIDI notes in the PRV? If so, how do I do it?

I don't mean having it as a plug-in. It can still behave like an offline "process," just one that doesn't mess with my audio file. Other DAW's do it that way. The same way that volume automation, edits, phase invert, EQ and most other processing is handled: the audio file sits unaltered on the disk and the DAW applies the processing during playback/mixdown.

Non-destructive normalize is surely at the top of my feature request list. The fact that it's destructive in the first place seems kind of weird, like why normalization out of all the things that you can do to audio in Cakewalk? Do anything you want to do to your sound except....normalize its level?

SONAR Platinum came with more modules including compressors and a limiter, so more PC modules do exist and are in the possession of BandLab. They would need to test them with the current Cakewalk and decide whether to re-release them. There were also a few companies whose products were released in the format. The only one I can think of at the moment is Boz Digital's Bark of Dog I, but there were others.

I get you, and thank you for reminding me of Heimholz and On the Sensations of Tone and how any waveform can be created using sines. In my musings I had sort of forgotten about ol' Hermann's work. I would like to point out that I did not say that "sine waves do not exist in the real world," I said "almost entirely devoid of pure sine waves," which is different. I also did not mean to imply that the standard hearing test was somehow not valid nor suited to its purpose of measuring hearing loss, although I can see where it looked as if I was. What I was contending, and still do, is that when discussing audio reproduction and perception, there may be abilities or acuities we haven't studied on the human side, and things on the reproduction side that relate to that. We already know, for instance, that different people have different curves and different ranges. What if we also have differing degrees of sensitivity to IM distortion or group delay or phase coherence or transient sharpness or whatever? Maybe researchers are studying that, I don't know. The most prominent blind test I've seen for whether people could choose lossless vs. lossy music files, the NPR one, was completely flawed due to the delivery system being a web browser. Yet hundreds of thousands of people accept it as proof that even recording engineers can't spot the difference. Well, not through Firefox I can't. I am a skeptic. I accept 100% that recording at 96K should make no difference whatsoever in what a normal human can hear. My hearing rolls off around 12K anyway. I record at 44.1. I am also open to the possibility that recording at higher rates may have some side effect that makes the audio sound better to some people. Maybe not all people, maybe just people with the ears that are extra sensitive to whatever. 50 years ago guitar amplifier designers and musicians and audio engineers were told that vacuum tubes would soon be phased out in favor of solid state devices, that transistor amplification was in every way superior, if they heard any difference it was imaginary, or the solid state device would sound superior, etc. and so on. The only people who bucked this were the musicians, and since they were all on drugs anyway, nobody paid them any mind. I will not bore you with recapping the story of how that turned out, but I will say that I have made a good living recapping tube amplifiers from 50 years ago.

Although I have what I consider to be a decent quiver of mics for a home studio (Audio Technica, MXL, Sterling, Shure), every so often I like to set up something weird just to see what I can do with it. The other night I recorded some acoustic guitar stereo mic'd using a tie clip lav of unknown provenance into the mic in on my Dell laptop for one channel and the laptop's built-in mic for the other. Once I pulled the room resonance out of it with proximity eq and put on MAutoAlign it started to sound like it could be usable as a background atmosphere track. A BM800 is not a useless microphone for a beginner to start using and man I would have loved to have one 35 years ago. The best thing to do when asking for help in improving tracks is to post an example track so that we can hear how your track sounds now. The BandLab site is a great way to host tracks for free for those of us on the forum to listen to. I'm in agreement with the others who have suggested that from the photo, putting up some sound-deadening on your walls or going to a room with as few reflections as possible will probably make things easier. With a Chinese medium diaphragm condenser, which I believe the BM800 is, I'd start out with the "address" side of the mic facing the 12th fret about 12" away. Record and see how it sounds. If it's too boomy, move it away, too thin, get closer. Once recorded, use a para EQ to roll off the bass up to about 200Hz, and find the "honk" frequency and notch it down by about 5dB. Then add a bit of medium room reverb. Tezza's suggestions are excellent. Trial and error, there's going to have to be some of that. YouTube viewing, some of that, too. Post recording(s)!

As I described, "pristine," meaning clean, without adding or subtracting anything. Put in a 10Hz-20KHz sweep recorded at 44.1K, convert it to 96K, compare the two waveforms using the appropriate analysis tools and they should match. By "mastered," I meant whether they had had some kind of final mixdown or processing done at that rate, for whatever reason. On another subject, an aspect of audio perception that I just thought of that I have never seen discussed is possible differences in people's ability to detect transients. I've never been tested for anything like that by an audiologist. They put headphones on me and run a series of pure monophonic sine waves and that's the extent of my hearing test. It's 100% frequency response. Seeing how our hearing evolved in an environment that was almost entirely devoid of pure sine waves, yet filled with directional transients that were important to hear if one were to survive, maybe there's more to the story than can be learned by playing sine waves to people. Is it possible that frequency response has been deemed the thing that matters because that's the thing the researchers know how to test for? ? It wouldn't be the first time....

I've not looked into their descriptions, but yeah, it sure would be nice to know whether the record in question was actually mastered at that rate. ?Otherwise, as you say, even if the buyer does think that there's some benefit to be gained by playing a higher bit rate file back through their fancy DAC, they could get the same effect by running their 44.1K or 48K lossless file through a good resampling program. And when I say "good" resampling program, I only wish that every audio program could up and down sample audio at every rate without bungling it. The fact that not all of them do is an empirically proven fact. Our dear Cakewalk's resampling algorithms handle the job in pristine fashion. (There's a site that shows test results on this, and I've resampled sine waves in upward and downward directions in programs I use then compared the results using SPAN. Oh man.) I was surprised that the Radiohead album was offered lossless at 48K and not at 44.1K. That implies to me that they're working at 48 rather than the old CD-friendly 44.1. I still work at 44.1 because....habit? Tradition? My Firepod takes a moment to switch rates when I play back different files.