Starship Krupa

To reiterate what everyone else has said and point something else out: iZotope Ozone already has an algorithmic mastering wizard. I don't know how it compares to any of the online services, but I find it useful as a starting off point, to compare my progress as I learn more about mastering. The traditional thinking on mastering is, as @bitflipper says, putting your mix in front of a pro who knows how to get the best out of it. The idea is that the mix engineer and artist may also be too "close" to the mix after working on it for weeks. And that the processes of mixing and mastering use different tools and have different goals. Mixing (to me) is at its essence getting everything sitting pretty in a sonic space. Mastering is applying final compression and limiting and EQ and maybe some spatializing to give an overall polish and loudness, coherence and depth. Depending on the genre, punch and/or warmth. I personally subscribe to the traditional thinking, but my problem is that I can't afford to hire someone, so I try to separate the processes as much as possible. I do my mix as a mix, with no effects on the Master bus, only channel and submix effects. Then when I have everything in its own space sonically, I start with one of my mastering chains. The mastering process may reveal a need to revisit the mix. If so, I do, but I turn off the mastering effects. One of the most important techniques is, of course, referencing to other professionally mastered material that has the sound I would like my piece to have. I think the online services would be useful inasmuch as they are another algorithm to compare my work to, but they are still just algorithms, like the one in Ozone. There was an algorithmic one I downloaded a couple of years ago, AAMS or something like that? Anyway, I ran it against one of my mixes and liked my own results better. There's no need to get redneck-y about mastering wizards. To use bitflipper's analogy about the houses, it's as if they gave you a beige house but left out the part that says you're not allowed to change the color. Ozone at least is just a set of the same FX that we all use manually. Some of those FX can be set up by robot, some not so much. Limiters, for instance, can do pretty well with an adaptive algorithm. An EQ curve can be applied based on what genre. I notice that Neutron is utter poo when it comes to setting compression parameters.... Heh, maybe at some point, we'll see a "John Henry" or "Big Blue" type mastering competition to see if an algorithmic mastering program can outdo a human. "Bob Ludwig was a disk masterin' man...."

I don't completely understand what you mean. Ozone Elements 9 is a small suite that has only the EQ, Maximizer, and Spatializer modules. Yes, it does have the Mastering Assistant, no you are not forced to use it. It can only be used as a plug-in inside a host. It can't be used in standalone form and the modules can't be used separately from the main suite.

I'm not a fan of "this doesn't answer my question," answers but I'm going to follow in Sidney's footsteps and offer an alternate/similar/complementary suggestion. I have no experience with online mastering services. However. Pluginboutique is currently running a promotional deal where all the iZotope Elements packages are $8.88, including Ozone Elements 9. It includes the aforementioned "good EQ and limiter" in addition to a spatializing tool. Somewhat controversial advice: it also comes with a very useful set of presets and a "mastering assistant" wizard that can analyze your track and apply suggested settings that you can then tweak to suit your taste. I have found it to be a valuable tool for learning my own mastering techniques. It's also great for quickie use when I've just recorded some stuff, thrown together a rough mix and want it to sound good right away. $8.88 is the proverbial "no brainer" just to get the EQ and maximizer/limiter. They also have Neutron Elements for the same price, which I would snag as well, if you don't have that, and RX Elements. I'd skip Nectar Elements, as it doesn't allow access to the parameters, but they have Stutter Edit and Breaktweaker if you are into EDM. When I first got Ozone Elements, it was a bit heartbreaking, because I had been trying to learn mastering for some time, and then I slapped a few presets on this thing and they sounded so much better. But it challenged me, and I eventually got to where I like what I can do as much or better. Sometimes I use Ozone, sometimes other tools, sometimes a combination.

It's weird that the BA installer/uninstaller continues its downward spiral (if you hadn't noticed, it's also started to leave behind references to previous versions in the Windows app list), considering that it's pretty obvious that (while the Cakewalk devs have nothing to do with BandLab Assistant development) Cakewalk development has certainly not been scrimped on. I haven't spent as much time with the other BandLab DAW's, the Chrome, iOS, and Android ones, but they're sharp, modern-looking apps and haven't crashed on me. BandLab Assistant itself is a good-looking, stable utility with features that go beyond just being an installation manager for Cakewalk (no, really). But this one specific component of BA, its own updater/installer, they just can't get that thing right. And the "check my own version, download and install update if needed, restart myself" problem is not one that is new or unique to BandLab Assistant. Which is....unfortunate, because I have a hunch that most Cakewalk users are like me and only start BA when they need it, which is usually to update to the most recent build of Cakewalk. And the first thing BA does is try to update itself, which fails, giving the subsequent proceeding an air of fail. We all know better intellectually, but it's still like having a baggage handler bang a cart into the side of your plane loud enough to hear it before the plane takes off. From what I read on the forum, BA is not the most popular feature to start with....?

And I apologize in return, it was my ***** attempt at disingenuous humor, I didn't think that you meant it as a mean joke. I was in a weird mood and posted after I had been up many hours. The more I thought about it, though, it is kind of odd to see an obituary in with "deals," isn't it?

I hope that someday the installer/updater for BandLab Assistant reaches the high standards achieved by other BandLab software.

I agree! Welcome to the community of Cakewalk users! The company who own Cakewalk don't spend much to advertise it, so tell your friends how much you like it, what a good deal you think it is.

That's kinda harsh, posting news of a fellow musician's death as a "deal." I've never much cared for Pat Metheny either, but I don't begrudge other people listening to his stuff and I think I've seen Mr. Mays credited on some recordings that I do enjoy. What if someone on this forum were friends with Lyle Mays and saw this mean joke?

Good call. I think I may also have had a PAS (plug-in acquisition syndrome) response to the inquiry: of COURSE this guy wants to find more plug-ins for CbB, doesn't everyone? ?

That is odd. So there were newer versions of these plug-ins than the ones that come with CbB? Do you remember if they had any differences in appearance or function?

A little attempt at humor. Actually, so many people who post here butcher the name of the software that no matter what they call it, I just assume they are talking about Cakewalk by BandLab, the name of which is up at the top of the forum, and which they would have had to have seen on several messages before even getting here. So whether they call it "BandLab" or "BandLab Sonar" or "the new SONAR" or "Bandlad Cakewalk" or "CbD" or "CdB" I just reply with what I hope is something that will help. If they say "SONAR," that help will include the suggestion to switch/upgrade to Cakewalk. I've never heard of a "bandlab mix-editor" that one may download. The only BandLab DAW's I've ever used were Cakewalk (of course) and the browser, iOS, and Android ones. There is a button in BandLab Assistant that will take the user to the browser version, but it's not downloadable and to my knowledge one may not "acquire" effects for it. The effects are included and proprietary. I find it puzzling that people get this far with registering an account and all the windows and forum headers and topics and everything and still be so confused, but they do, and obviously they can use some info once they get here. I don't even know if there are user forums for the other BandLab DAW's, but if the OP is trying to figure out how to add FX to his tracks in the browser-based Mix-Editor, such forums would be a better bet than this one.

Cheers, John. Sounds like the rep was being kinda unscrupulous and misrepresenting the true position of the parent company at the expense of making sales. Maybe that's part of why Roland USA is now a big thing. ? I'll bet that if you had confronted him a year later he would have claimed ignorance of how much Roland had already thrown their weight behind the new spec. Since MIDI is literally a refinement of DCB (according to the Wikipedia article, anyway), if it were "defective and full of flaws," that wouldn't speak too well of DCB! By now I'm sure you know about lead times and how long it takes for a company to get an electronic product into production from conception to delivery. Back then it was even longer, so for Roland to be selling MIDI-capable gear as soon as they were after that rep's spiel....however the math works out. At least anyone who bought into DCB was able to get a converter box. In my imagination, the legendary lunch discussion at NAMM between Kakehashi (Roland), Oberheim, and Smith (Sequential) may have started with the idea of the other two companies licensing DCB from Roland. Now if I'm Tom Oberheim and Dave Smith, I'm going to balk at that because Kakehashi (or forces at Roland) may decide to change the spec to favor their interests. It's a great idea to have everything able to connect to everything else, all those companies are starting to have "systems," and they are willing to admit that some artists prefer workflow and sound from one company's box over another, and ultimately it will be good for the industry as a whole. So Kakehashi compromises: okay, let's do an open standard, but let's make it pretty close to my DCB so that it will be easy for us to retrofit existing product. Sends the schematics off to Smith in California and after hundreds of FAX exchanges between California and Japan, it's on. Then they need to define a data protocol. Yamaha buys in, hey this will be great for the new low cost FM synth we want to introduce.... And every keyboard salesman everywhere begins to have nightmares where people are asking them "does it have MIDI?" My main MIDI input controller is a Kawai K1 that my ex gave me when she moved out. It has this annoying "feature" where it sends All Notes Off (aka "panic") whenever the last key is lifted. So any patch with a long release is suddenly chopped. They considered this so important that there is no way to turn it off in the synth, I have to use a MIDI plug-in to filter it.

Wellll, actually. Roland were one of the original companies who contributed to the idea in the first place, and hardware-wise, 5-pin DIN MIDI owes a lot to DCB. But don't just take my word. From Wikipedia: "The MIDI Standard was born out of conversations between Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim, Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential Circuits president Dave Smith at the Summer NAMM show in 1981.....Using Roland's DCB as a basis, Smith and Sequential Circuits engineer Chet Wood devised a universal synthesizer interface...." It was a long time ago. I was living in Sunnyvale, California, USA, not far from Sequential Circuits' headquarters. I was also an avid reader of not only Electronic Musician, but Polyphony, the self-published 'zine that @Craig Anderton published before EM began. I think I may still have a cache of back issues of Polyphony around somewhere. Craig probably named the magazine that because at the time it seemed like an unobtainable goal, like nirvana. I worked across the street from Atari, which was just then about to implode. The ST400 and ST800 were the systems to have for musicians, though. I attended the 1982 US Festival and met Bob Moog, who, between having lost and regained control of his company name, had taken a gig doing something or other with Fairlight, IIRC. He gave a lecture and demonstrated the Fairlight System at the festival. My first exposure to musical sampling, so I can say "Bob Moog was the one who introduced me to sampled instruments." Mattel showed off their Synsonics drum machine at the US Festival as well. I wanted one immediately! 5-pin DIN, no MIDI. Never got one, but I did get a TR-606 a couple of years later. 5-pin DIN, no MIDI. Sold it on eBay 20 years ago for a small profit. A few years later I veered off into San Francisco and the underground music scene of the day. The groundwork was being laid for the grunge wave that was (to us at least) a rebellion against corporation-approved-and-packaged pop of the early and mid-80's. Which had been characterized by both big synth sounds and by pop metal shred dudes with MIDI-controlled guitar rigs. The hip music world went low tech for a good while and I happily went right along with it. I didn't become interested in MIDI or electronic music again until around 1999 when the rave scene was in full bloom in the San Francisco area and I started digging deep house and downtempo electronic sounds as well as the Big Beat thing that Fatboy Slim got up to. Now that stuff is retro and I still like it. It's fun to be able to jump from writing and recording totally "live rock band" songs to composing "ambient electronic" to something else that is inspired by Air or Nine Inch Nails all centered around the same music-making software.

Aaaaargh! This is one of my personal peeves, if it is the case with Melodyne. When I am running an analysis program, and I kind of know where the data are going to fall, how about the program lets me do some of the heavy lifting before we start and I can tell it that for instance the song is definitely not going to wander beyond 150-160BPM? So then it can filter out glitch results like 78BPM. So that it can focus its powerful detection algorithm in that range rather than figuring out everything from 1BPM to 250BPM.

+1 on posting examples of the recorded files. It would be good to have examples of both acceptable and unacceptable recordings. If you use your BandLab profile to host the audio you can link to the files using a button right here in the message editor. Makes it simple. I endorse upgrading your system from Windows 7 to Windows 10. More and more software and hardware companies are abandoning development for Windows 7 and compatibility issues will only get worse the longer you wait. While Cakewalk will install and run in Windows 7, it is specifically optimized to take advantage of features in Windows 10, and is extensively tested in Windows 10.

One caution: when doing this, I consider it best practice to go easy on the FX I'm using. Just whatever I or the talent need to hear to get a good performance. Or if I have a rockabilly singer and they need to hear the slapback so they can do the "hug-a-mug-a-huh" thing in the right rhythm or whatever. If you find that there is a noticeable delay in monitoring, it could be caused by a plug-in. iZotope products are well-known for this. They sound amazing when I use them on mixdown, but I can't use them while I'm tracking because they cause so much latency. The thing to do in that case is only use the FX that you need for the vocal tracking session and disable the rest. Then flip the others back on at mixing time.

Good idea, unless the OP really just wants to skip that part and go straight to "acquiring effects."

Oh, the hopes I had for that part of the spec. Unlike the rest of it, which is redundant rubbish, this is something that I could get behind. That's really using your heads, thinks I. Instead of sitting there churning away, all these programs-within-a-program can intelligently go into a sleep state so that the processor-intensive cabinet simulation convolver you're using on nothing but the 4-bar guitar solo can just pop in and do its thing and then politely release its resources. Ah, but a couple of things about this spec that even I, as a cynical, informed veteran of the consumer software industry, didn't pick up on immediately. First, I'm going to hazard a guess that there's some kind of signaling protocol that comes from the host that tells compliant VST3's that they are allowed to go sleepy. Only if this=TRUE may VST3 go sleepy. Otherwise we play it safe and stay "on." This would be for processing FX that have long "tails" and perhaps for troubleshooting and such. So right off the bat the host has to be able to give it the okay to sleep. Maybe some hosts will decide that it's not worth the effort and just leave the condition=FALSE so that VST3's never go offline. Second, and this is most important, notice how the pitch says "can" rather than "will" or "must." That means that it's only a feature that the plug-in may implement or not at the choices of the developer. For now, most developers are still coding their VST plug-ins in both VST2 and VST3 formats. With the exception of Waves, have any of them touted any features that are exclusive the VST3 version of their product that are or were not available in the VST2 version? That would be a good way to find out. I am pretty sure that as much as possible they are keeping a common codebase for both the VST2 and VST3 versions, and/or in some cases, using their own portable VST2-to-VST3 wrappers. All of which seems to preclude using the "processing economy" feature. If I am remembering correctly, someone asked Vojtech on the Meldaproduction forum if he were using the feature or had any plans to in the immediate future and he replied that he had experimented with it and decided not to for whatever reason. He seemed a little dismissive, but dismissiveness toward other people's technology is kind of his default mode. From what I've seen on DAW forums in general, I've yet to find anyome who noticed a difference in resource usage doing side=by-side tests of the same plug in VST2 and VST3 versions. Still. I use VST3's wherever possible, because that's the way the industry is headed and if there are problems, I want the people I get my pluggies and hosts from to know about them.

That's a pretty strong statement! Given that you are bringing this up in the "Themes" subforum, is this a matter of colors and text colors and button styles for you? If so, this is the right place to look, and I'll ask: if it's a matter of theming, then there may be an existing user-created one that might be less....um, repulsive, and if you give us better clues about what's so barf-o-bits we might be able to point you in the right direction. If it's not so much a matter of colors and such, then that's more fundamental than "theming," and voicing your dissatisfaction in the "feedback" forum would be better.

@msmcleod, who participated in this thread earlier, is a member of the development team, so it's on the radar.

@Dennis G Pelton, welcome to Cakewalk and welcome to the thread. As mentioned, orchestral sounds are the most difficult, but there are some recent posts in this thread about them. B3's are another toughie. The thread's supposed to be about free instruments, but the following are inexpensive enough to almost count. ? At Pluginboutique, you can currently pick up SONIVOX' Film Score Companion Suite for $29. It includes their Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass instruments, as well as a sampled piano and orchestral percussion. I've spent $10-$15 each on licenses for the Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass as individual instruments and consider it money well spent. As for the B3, they also have AIR's DB-33 for $15. It's one of the best B3 and Leslie emulations I've found. (and if you buy something from PB right now, you get licenses for 2 of their sound banks and the player to use them-a nice add on)

As I understand it through reading various fora and my experience with plug-ins, the VST3 spec added a few features that were already being implemented by many, if not most, plug-in manufacturers within the VST 2.4 spec. These were most notably sidechaining and UI scaling. Sidechaining is not inherently "difficult" with VST2.4 or DX plug-ins. The ones that implement it have a button or checkbox in the UI to turn it on, and the hosts interface with it in their own ways, just as with VST3. Similarly, there were/are plenty of VST2 plug-ins that implemented UI scaling before VST3 was published. All VST3 does is define how everyone should implement it if they choose to do so. Another thing to be aware of: as with most industry specs, just because sidechaining and UI scaling are defined in the VST3 spec, plug-in manufacturers are not obligated to do it. Nor are hosts. AFAIK, there is no organization that enforces compliance with the specification. Anyone can publish a plug-in and say "it's a VST3." In my experience, the only advantage that the VST3 spec brought was defining the install location as C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\ One big disadvantage is that as @marled mentioned, preset handling changed somehow. It used to be that when I installed a VST2, it could install presets to the host natively, but that seems to have been abandoned with VST3 in favor of each plug-in having its own poorly-implemented preset manager. Both plug-in and DAW manufacturers seem to be having a rocky time making the transition from VST2 to VST3. I've had several instances of crashy/buggy plug-in syndrome in different DAW's where the cure was to switch to the VST2 version. Cakewalk itself has had past issues with state-saving (now happily fixed) due to certain plug-in manufacturers being sloppy with their VST3 implementation. Unfortunately as scook says, Steinberg has deprecated the VST2 spec in favor of the VST3 spec, so going forward, we'll have the format that doesn't yet seem to work as well. I don't see any hosts except for maybe Cubase and Nuendo dropping VST2 support. It'll be a drag for Cubase users because they'll be stuck with libraries of legacy VST2's that they can't use. My current policy is to install the VST3 version if the plug-in has it, switch to the VST2 if it crashes my host(s).

To answer Music Radar's question: while it looks as if it should be of reasonable interest to people who compose and perform EDM, I do not think that this 1 euro soft synth will change the VST plug-in market forever.

Hello and welcome to Cakewalk and the Cakewalk forum. There is a variety of effects (FX for short) included with CbB, some of them quite good, some of them excellent. My guess is that you are new to the world of DAW's so I will suggest that as you start out, figure out how to use what's already there in Cakewalk. As I say, they sound good, but another benefit is that if you ask for advice on this forum, it will be easier for anyone on here to give you advice if you are using tools we all have access to. There are two EQ's supplied. One, the Sonitus Equalizer, may be added via the track or bus FX rack. The other is the Quadcurve EQ, which may be added via the ProChannel. Both are versatile parametric EQ's. There are three reverbs that come with Cakewalk. BREVERB (algorithmic reverb) may be added via FX rack or ProChannel, REMatrix Solo (convolution reverb) may be added via ProChannel, and Space (may be added as a ProChannel Style Dial). Space is the simplest, a one-knob "clockwise is more" reverb. Cakewalk comes with most of the tools one needs to mix a song (some might say all). Having said that, I augment it with a variety of plug-in FX, both free and commercial, which make it easier for me to get the sound I like. I'm putting links down below to sources for plug-ins to augment the ones that come with CbB. Here are relevant documentation pages regarding how to add effects to your projects' tracks: Included plug-ins Adding effects to a track ProChannel (humorous content ahead) Later, as you grow bored with recording and mixing music, you can start "acquiring" effects, a pastime which once you start engaging in it can help ensure that you never need play or record another note, just spend all your DAW time hunting down freebies and deals and auditioning plug-ins trying to find the "best" emulation of a hardware compressor you've never used in real life. Here is how you can get started (even for free): Favorite freeware FX thread Favorite freeware instruments thread Deals

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.