Starship Krupa

This is very true. It's also true that everyone has to and does start somewhere. My beginnings were much more primitive than Lum's. It's also true that all of us have some limit to the amount of money we can spend on equipment. However high or low it may be. Also true that none of us, wherever we are in the journey of acquiring tools and the skills to use them, bought all our stuff at once, nor was the first stuff we bought the very top of the line. It's also true that we don't all buy the same stuff. Fortunately for the style of vocal pop with synthesizer backing that he's doing, his Dell notebook, a halfway decent USB condenser mic, a good set of cans and a keyboard controller will do for a while, and the rest is up to whatever skills he can build as a singer, composer, engineer and producer. The things that caught my eye right away were first that Lum figured out on his own that something wasn't right with his track using speaker system referencing. Then he came to the forum with a detailed inquiry with the right information for the people he was asking. And he wasn't afraid to say that his laptop was old or that he was mixing on earbuds. Playback system referencing is a favorite technique of mine, and not incidentally, one of the ways that can help a mix engineer who is working with low budget equipment. If you don't have a good system (and even if you do), you can at least take your mix and play it back on as many systems as you can, and compare it to songs you like on the same systems. That's what he did, and my impression is that he figured it out by himself. Truth, I'm more interested in talking with a dude with $70 in monitoring equipment and an aging notebook, singing into his phone mic, who notices that it's weird that his mix sounds okay on system 1 and 2 but sucks on system 3, while the ones he's trying to emulate sound good on all of them, then takes that information to a forum of strangers for help than a guy who wants to talk about how it was only once he found the right NOS tube for his Manley preamp that his recordings started having a truly open soundstage.? (gestures to mic locker and monitors) "It is not what is in here or here that makes great mixes." (points at temple, then sternum) "It is what is in here, and in here."

Yes, a good USB microphone, it will do wonders for your vocal sound. While you are waiting for it, and you can practice with your phone mic, you can study singing and mic technique in YouTube videos. I liked your basic singing voice, but there are simple ways that you can improve your technique so you will not be making as many of those lip clicks and pops. Think about singing from farther back in your mouth/throat. If it doesn't suit you, you don't have to keep doing it, but I think you might like the result. Also, there is the trick of singing across the diaphragm of the mic instead of what people usually do, which is sing straight into it. Try setting your phone on a shelf and singing across the mic. You have nothing to lose, and every take is at least practice. ? My advice about your headphones was because they are the best you have right now, so get used to how music sounds on them. You will know how your favorite artists sound on your headphones, so you can compare their sound to yours on your headphones. Their music may sound bassy, but at least you will know that. Later you can get a pair of better Sonys or Audio-Technicas or Sennheisers or AKG's or some monitors if your living/financial situation allows it. The Sonys will sound more accurate than the earbuds at least. Out of all 3 of your "gears" they are the best for mixing. Your subwoofer system has bass, the headphones have bass, so you'll probably get a better picture. But next thing after the mic may be a better set of cans? ? You can ask our opinions here, and I am sure you will get many. For as many freeware plug-in effects as you can handle, check this out. Everything works in Cakewalk and doesn't cost anything. I don't know what your finances are, but I get the idea that you, like me, have a hobbyist budget for your music. Every month, one of my favorite software dealers gives away a free license for a plug-in with any purchase, usually it's good and useful software. This month it's a vocal plug-in. Just sign up for an account and buy one item, they have things as low as $5 US and you get the free thing with it. Every so often they give away licenses for one of the iZotope Elements suites, which are excellent, especially helpful for beginners to get good results with. https://www.pluginboutique.com/ They still have iZotope/Exponential Phoenix, the best reverb plug-in I've ever heard for $9 US, or Cyclone, an excellent bus/mastering compressor, for $8. Either of those would be a useful tool and you'd get the ERA Vocal Leveler too.

This is a known bug, the devs are aware of it, and it is in their queue to be addressed. I, too suffer from this one, and all I have is a Korg nanoKONTROL beside the MIDI port on my audio interface. If you download the Reference Guide and study the section pertaining to control surfaces, you'll see that Cakewalk is supposed to keep track of this stuff. I'm sure they'll get it sorted soon enough.

So you are starting on a very low budget, and that is fine. That's not a bad sound you're getting for a phone mic recording, although I do hear some lip and tongue noise, which is why I suggested de-essing. A phone mic will pick up more of that than one designed for singing because it has a smaller diaphragm and is designed to make the speaking voice well understood. You may be able to reduce the lip sounds by placing the mic a few centimetres further away when you sing. See if you can figure out whether your app is using the "telephone" mic or the "camera" mic, and adjust to account for that. Most smartphones with cameras have a mic on the front for taking movies that sounds better than the phone call mic. As you get more into this hobby and want it to sound more like the polished songs you hear, as with anything, you need to do what they do, and the next investment you should make is to get a microphone. I don't know where you live, but here are some suggestions that I think would work well to get you started: https://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/behringer-c-1u-usb-studio-condenser-mic/ I own the version of that Behringer without the USB interface built in and it is a very good sounding microphone. I have used it to record voice and electric guitar and it worked well with both, especially considering the low price. https://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/samson-meteor-usb-mic/ I have no direct experience with this one, but it gets good reviews and Samson markets quality products for the budget market. My next, easier, bit of advice is to start mixing (and listening) using your Sony headphones. The XBR450's are designed to have hyped bass (eXtra B*****), but they are decent quality consumer cans. Get used to what well-produced music sounds like on the same thing you use to mix it. Disable the Windows Sound Enhancements on your system and get VLC Media Player and MusicBee so that you can hear in great detail what your music really sounds like. Windows Media Player puts processing of its own on your files as it plays them. Music Bee can use WASAPI or even ASIO mode just like Cakewalk to use your computer's audio output device more directly. John, the first recordings I did were into a monophonic Sony tape recorder with a small handheld dynamic mic. This rig was pretty nice for its time, about 50 years ago, and probably cost my grandma about the same as Lum's phone. His phone mic, which is an electret condenser, is getting a better capture than my Sony dynamic used to. My options for file export and editing were....fewer. We all start somewhere, and if I had had a smartphone and the power of a 2011 Dell laptop and a pair of Sony cans to work with 50 years ago, things may have gone differently.

Lum, You are doing the right thing by listening on different systems. Also asking for advice. I have a hard time doing that myself. My mobile Cakewalk system is a Dell E6410 laptop from 2010. I often reference mixes using consumer Sony headphones similar to yours and have even tried recording just for fun using the built-in camera mic as a room mic. Not recommended for mass distribution! ? I listened to the file that you attached to your post and in my opinion there are no problems with it that would be solved by spending a pile of money on equipment. After all, you didn't even say what kind of gear you used to record, and to monitor while you were mixing, you only told us what you were using to reference listen. But that stuff only matters as you go along, and what kind of results you want to get. You didn't say what you used on your voice, but I think you're off to a good start. My equipment suggestion for getting started recording vocal pop like you are doing would be a USB condenser mic. I can purchase Chinese-manufactured ones of acceptable quality for well under $100 here in the USA. You don't say what your mix monitor system is, but I could mix with those Sony cans while I saved up for something more accurate. The IDT chip in your Dell will drive them plenty loud, undistorted, and with a flat frequency response as long as you use the Sound app in your Control Panel to disable any Windows "enhancements." Where I will agree with those who say you need to spend more money is if you want your mixes to sound just like the ones you hear on the radio and on YouTube. You will need a good quality microphone for your voice and a good quality external audio interface if you want to go that far. But you have a journey ahead of you, and you don't need to spend all that money at once if you don't have it or don't want to right now. You can have fun and learn and get pretty good results with maybe just a better mic. There's so much you will learn, about compression, reverb, EQ, and being good at using those things has WAY more effect on how your mixes sound than whether you are monitoring on the laptop headphone jack vs. the headphone jack on a fancy audio interface. At this point, your mix might even sound worse played back on a $1000 audio interface than it does through your Dell's headphone jack. So, after all my great advice ?, you like how the file sounds on the ear buds and the cans, can you describe what's wrong with it on your satellite/sub system? Too much bass, too little bass? Shrill? Distorted? Hum? Hiss? As a mix critique, I suggest that maybe you should use some FX, EQ and compression. Specifically, try a little bit of de-essing and room reverb on your lead vocal, and mastering compression and limiting on the Master bus. There are some good vocal processing tools in VX-64, you just need to enable it. (Kurre, Lum said that other audio sounded good through the Edifier system, so it seems like he's not having technical issues with the speakers)

I was not a SONAR Platinum user, but I've been watching from the sidelines as people have brought their systems up to date and hey, congratulations, new computer day. Laptops are notorious for coming with a bit more than the usual load of unnecessary programs, so if you know someone locally or online who can assist you in a good Windows 10 de-shovelware, that would help get the full value from your nice new system. Heck, just from installing Windows 10 on my old computer I was picking Office and Solitaire installs off of the hard drive for days, and SSD's still aren't that big around my house. The heavier hitters will be around to advise you later and let you know if I miss anything, but here's how it goes: Set up the last version of 64-bit SONAR Platinum on your new computer, get everything squared away just the way you want it, using the install DVD's and website downloads and serial #'s and all that. Install all the plug-ins that you need to load the projects you still want to work on, the bundled stuff from SONAR. Cakewalk by BandLab is a 64-bit program, it can host 32-bit VST's and VSTi's and 64-bit DXi's. Its tech specs are similar to SONAR Platinum, so if you could load an effect or instrument in Platinum, you can load it in CbB. Set it all up, your audio interface, everything the way you want it. The Windows 10 UI isn't all that different, they even let you use a Start menu. I held out until about a year ago and I have to say they won me over. The plug 'n' play works better all the time, boot times are faster. The only issue is that I see people complaining that Microsoft's updates cause issues with the kind of complex hardware that audio/video people use, so who knows. Then once it's all dialed in, download BandLab Assistant, which among other things acts as a downloader/installer/license validator/updater. BandLab Assistant has options to have it always running in your tray or you can switch it off and check for updates manually. Click on the Apps tab, follow the prompts and BA will install Cakewalk by BandLab right alongside the installation of SONAR you just set up, and it should use all the same settings as well, so you won't need to tell it where your plug-ins and project and template folders are. Then you're done. Oh, except download the new Reference Guide and learn about the pile of new features Cakewalk's gotten since the reboot. Yee-ha!

Aw, Steve, you ought to know that I myself don't care for being peddled a workaround when a bug fix or feature request is in order. I was only trying to offer a little tip for people who need to get this to work in the meantime and want to do it by renaming their files. I'm keeping in mind that these threads are read by many people other than those of us who actively participate. I understand the point of Robert's thread: CbB should readily open/handle MIDI files with the .midi extension. Until it does, there are multiple workarounds. The simplest, IMO, is renaming the .midi files to .mid. This is a way to do it in bulk.

Robert and Steve know this, but for anyone reading who has perhaps not spent as much time at a DOS/Windows command line, if you have a lot of these files to rename, you can do a folder full with "ren *.midi *.mid" from a command prompt. You must of course navigate to the folder that contains the .midi files you wish to rename before executing the command. I find renaming multiple files from the GUI to be very tedious and hope that this may spare someone.

I wonder if it was due to requests from the A=432 hippies. But then they wouldn't be using Cheeze Machine 'cause it isn't vegan, so ya got me.

So the bugginess is of the crashing variety rather than the "this feature doesn't act right" variety. Considering that the Orchestral Companion instruments that I have are bare bones players for well-known libraries (which is fine with me in this context), seems like they'd have to have really botched it to get crash bugs. At least the ones I have are very solid, never a crash in the years I've been using them. The only issue was with this odd note playback truncation when certain DAW's use them in loop playback mode. Mixcraft was susceptible to it, then they coded around it, Cakewalk has never suffered from it. Thanks for speaking up. Unless people say something, unaware customers will keep giving companies money for crashy software and they will have less incentive to repair it.

I'm a fan of the Strings and Woodwinds as well, for $20, this is a lot of virtual instruments.

I suggest you enable VX-64 Vocal Strip using the Cakewalk Plug-In Manager. Useful for many things, it has a de-esser as one of its modules. Use the forum search to find out how to do that. Upper right corner there.

Whoa. This is an example of why it's great for me to read these threads. Yes, of course. A workflow change here. Once I've edited out the breaths and lip smacks and whatevers, or put on some iZotope RX7 De-Clip for a live recording or whatever, why do I need to burden the DAW with keeping track of all the clips and making it process it every time when I can bounce to clip and then it's just a nice clean audio file with all my edits in place? ?‍♂️ Of course, we all must choose the point at which we do this, for me it would be once I've done the basic cleanup, finished comping, if any. This. When the OP first said it, I thought of tape and splicing blocks! How old a skool are we talking about here? Now from what I gather, he means printing FX vs. recording dry and then using plug-ins ITB? If so, put me in the new skool camp. My plug-ins are way better than any of my outboard gear, and having a totally dry capture to work with affords the ultimate flexibility. I'm still learning the art of being a mix engineer, my skills improve every time I sit down with a project and start messing around with compressor and EQ settings, trying different things I learn from online tutorials, etc. Having raw stems to work with is best. I'm just a hobbyist, to me it's another instrument I'm learning to play. Every once in a while I get together something that I think is good enough to play for my friends. Maybe months from now I'll put it up on YouTube and Soundcloud, when I get enough material, Bandcamp. This is a very good strategy. One thing that is happening is that even for lanes and clips and entire tracks that are muted, Cakewalk still streams their associated audio files from disk every time you start the transport. Even when there is no unmuted audio associated with the file, it still gets streamed. I don't know why. I was having the same issue you were with the transport delay and did some investigation using Windows' Resource Monitor. It's only when the clips are within archived tracks that they stop being streamed from disk, so when I have many alternate takes in a project that I want to keep for whatever reason (maybe I notice a week later that there's a blown phrase in a vocal and I want to bring it in from another take), I move them to another track and then archive the track, as you do. I and others have made a feature request that takes can be archived, so we'll see where that goes.

I go by the theory/philosophy that just like in the physical world, locks exist to provide a deterrent, and that nothing will stop a truly determined intruder. My imagined internet intruder would be kiddies with some kind of bot going around knocking on doors, and when their bot finds an unlocked door, it knocks again, with the idea being that it's looking for targets of opportunity. If their bot can't even detect "unpatched Windows 7 box," it will just keep going looking for the next target of opportunity. Or if it does, and finds that the Win 7 box is isolated and therefore no fun, on it goes along its journey of discovery. So goes my theory, anyway. Are people's home networks really targets? Do we know of cases where unpatched devices with security holes were exploited to the detriment of home networks? I'm not talking about Stupid User Tricks like someone opening an email attachment, but OS exploits. They get a lot of press, but those are potential exploits, not cases where someone actually got pwned. There are now enough unpatched XP systems around that we should know, right? That would be an interesting experiment, build an XP box and leave it connected to the internet while logging network traffic just to see what happens. I really believe that as long as a person dedicates their Windows 7 computer to DAW use and doesn't do things like online banking with saved passwords on it that they have very little to be concerned about, except for the fact that Windows 10 seems to work better and that DAW companies are no longer concerning themselves with supporting Windows 7. The worst Windows OS exploit I ever experienced was one around '97 or so where you could send a packet to NT systems that would bounce people out of Quake servers. It took a couple of days for Microsoft to come up with a patch, during which time a few of my deathmatches were spoiled.

Look, if you're savvy enough to be that concerned, aren't you savvy enough to spend an afternoon getting your firewall chops honed enough to put something together that would protect you and all the stuff on your network? A 15-year-old Dell tower running a dedicated Linux-based build between your internet gateway and the rest of your network? 20 years ago I found this thing called GNATBox. I don't know if it's still around, but my guess is that by this time it's been forked like crazy and/or there are many alternatives. I used to run my own GNATBox here at my place with my computers behind it. If you're that paranoid, build a proxy server, your own bulletproof firewall, don't rely on Microsoft to push out security updates. Who knows what backdoors they have built in anyway? Put multiple NIC's in the aforementioned Linux box, set it up as a router, put your "vulnerable" system in its own 10.X.X.X network and don't allow it to route to the rest of your house. Internet only. There are multiple things you can do besides air gapping it. Air gapping is for kitty-kats. And at the end of the day, what is that "targeted attack" going to yield an intruder? In my case, I guess someone could steal my identity and ruin their credit rating.... ?

Resistance being futile, and all. (I don't hate the Player)

Can I use my Jam Points to buy one of these? And since the price is $99, will it count for the TS2Max crossgrade?

But it could be hyped-up brickwall-limited irredeemable bollocks! (j/k, I think Ozone is a wonderful tool in all its versions)

Oh, no, it works a treat! I wouldn't mix overheads without it or at least lining them up by eyeball. It's in every template on my overheads, and there whenever I stereo mic. I do measure from the center of my snare batter to the diaphragms of my overheads. I keep a few tailor's measuring tapes around the studio. They come in surprisingly handy for stuff like that. By "misfortune," I meant that I had the overwhelming impulse to buy it and then go back and apply it to every mix I'd ever done, which is a nasty habit to form. It happens sometimes when I get a plug-in that is such a step forward that it's a game-changer. Some I can think of that have been like that for me were Unlimited, MAutoAlign and most recently, Phoenix Stereo Reverb. I imagine that many people have gotten Ozone Elements as a freebie and had the urge to turn it loose on all their older material.

Noticed as in you can't tell just by listening to it, but I had the misfortune to try MAutoAlign when it came up during one of his 1/2 off sales. Put it on my drum overheads. Analyze, chug chug, doing! overheads go from sounding good to having this 3-D soundstage they sure didn't have earlier. Acoustic guitar mic'd with 2 close condensers, whoa, it's this 30' foot guitar in my monitors. You get the same effect lining it up by eye, just not the "wow" moment when the plug-in kicks in, and it depends on how far off and the program material, etc. I am a big fan of sample-level alignment. I am glad that you are starting to bother with it!

It would be possible for Cakewalk to make the naming of the inputs much friendlier. I don't know how the other programs do it, but I know enough about programming to know that it can be done via parsing and translation of what Windows is giving it from the driver, via brute force with a database of interfaces, or what the coders seem to have tried at one point, simply allowing the user to rename the inputs and outputs. That last doesn't work because Cakewalk doesn't allow us to rename the individual ones, only do it at the pair level, so input 2 still can't be called "Input 2." According to Cakewalk, there can be no such things as Inputs 2, 4, 6 or 8 on my FP10's.

I just realized that I had forgotten to post my favorite tremolo/panner, Pecheneg Tremolo. Small plug-in house. Really cool GUI, even though the plug-in is 5 years old, I'm a sucker for that glowing diving watch thing. Lets you tune shape, symmetry and phase in continuous flow between the settings, kind of like Soundspot Nebula, if Nebula only did volume and panning. (sorry, it's 5 years old, not 15!)

What a great resource! There are also these two ongoing threads in the Instruments and Effects subforum, they're both on the first page right now. I've lobbied for stickiedom, nothing yet, so they rely on bumps. Between them over 11,000 views so I hope they've been helpful. They're a tiny bit different from this 400 list, as everything in them is vetted by someone who's used them with Cakewalk so we know they're compatible on at least one user's system!:

Assuming that the 1818VSL is what it appears to be, a direct descendant of my FP10's, and the expansion chassis, which I assume is a PreSonus DigiMax or something similar gives you another 8 mic pres and inputs, similar to what I get when I daisy chain my 2 FP10's, you already have an interface/mixer with 16 inputs in your studio. PreSonus marketed the 1818VSL as an interface/digital mixer, with the accompanying wireless controller app running on an iPad. Have you ever used that? (I like the Firepods' output routing, there are 8 TRS outputs in 4 pairs that appear to Cakewalk, plus a stereo S/PDIF, so I have 4 pairs of monitors that I switch back and forth between for referencing mixes using the I/O selector on the bus, all inside Cakewalk. With both of them hooked up, and amps and speakers, there's no reason I couldn't do up to 16-channel surround mixes) The 24 doesn't look like it would get you anything you don't already have as far as recording interface/inputs, except for being limited to 44.1/48KHz. Its defining feature is really the fact that it can record to an SD card, so if, as you say, you have no interest in that, and you already have a 16 input interface that probably has better performance as an interface, it seems to me that the recording/interface capabilities of the Tascam are superfluous. That is, unless you'd see a great value in not needing to bring the PreSonus to live shows when you want to record, but then you could probably find a nice, compact mixer that would do the same mixing job as the Tascam 24 and have less mixer to schlep. The Tascam seems purpose made for one use: record to the card while you're doing live sound, then transfer the files to a DAW. They probably only made it a recording interface because in order to make a Portastudio they had to build most of the electronics of a recording interface into it, so why not. And that's why it only goes up to 48, because as a recording machine, it cares most about writing to that card. As far as the other people in this thread who are reporting that Cakewalk names the inputs using the odd-numbered ones, maybe you can access Input 2 under the name "Input 1L" or "Input 1R" or something like that? On my system, my first 2 inputs (which are labeled 1 and 2 and paired by having a bracket silkscreened around them) are named by Cakewalk "Left Firepod ASIO 1L" "Right Firepod ASIO 1L" and "Stereo Firepod ASIO 1L." So if we translate this all out, input 2 shows up in my list of choices as, literally, "right Firepod ASIO one left." Then the next pair are "Left Firepod 3L" and so on. Now if you told your sweating new tape op to make sure that the channel inputs are correct, all 16 of them, hmm, the XLR cable plugged into the bottom FP10, last input on the right. marked #8 is it supposed to be "Right Firepod 2 ASIO 7L?" This has caused me to fail to record things I wanted to record. Fortunately not vital things, just practice sessions, but still, I looked up at the end of 5 minutes and the wrong input was armed for recording. I brought it up with the developers in this forum and was told that Cakewalk regurgitates what the driver tells it and that was the way it was. However, Cakewalk is not the only audio program I run that uses ASIO inputs, it's merely the only one that allows the input labeling to remain indecipherable. The other programs have implemented the avant garde AI 2.0 algorithmical ability of Reformatting What The Driver Reports. I would like to see Cakewalk gain this feature, so feel free to register your displeasure and lobby for its addition. Here is an example of the input names looking much more understandable:

It's funny, I have had this odd prejudice about MAGIX, thinking of them as some kind of bargain basement toymaker. I don't know why exactly. Maybe because of Music Maker? I had this idea that once MAGIX bought a platform that it was all over. They seemed too quick to snap up castoff software lines that overlapped with their existing products, so how could they do justice to all of them? Then I picked up this huge Humble Bundle last year that took me from Sony Vegas Pro 10 to MAGIX Vegas Pro 15 and threw in a bunch of other MAGIX 'wares including Sound Forge. Vegas Pro went from being this glitchy, crashy, touchy thing to being quick and slick on the same hardware, and Sound Forge instantly became my go-to wave editor. Plenty of the other stuff that came in the bundle was powerful and useful as well, and rock solid. Some consumer-ish things like a vinyl and cassette transcribing program, but I dug into it and it turned out to have some iZotope RX-level restoration tools under the hood. They make quality products, my prejudice was wrong. As for GoldWave, I was turned on to it almost 10 years ago by a housemate who had purchased a lifetime license when he was in high school and holy mother of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, as long as you can deal with the look and feel it's supposed to be a powerhouse, especially in matters of audio forensics. It hurt my eyes and I kept thinking I needed to run it in compatibility mode. Not long after that NASA used it to pull the missing "a" out of Neil Armstrong's "That's one small step for <unintelligible> man, one giant leap for mankind" speech, which showed my silly butt not to judge a program's capabilities by the UI. Still, though. 1991 called and says you can keep its UI standards.