Starship Krupa

According to the Reference Guide, Quick Grouping should allow you to do this, but the feature doesn't work. It seems like it was designed in but never implemented. If you do a bit of digging you can find the page in the Guide where it says it should work just as you want it to. Feel free to start a thread in Feedback about how much you would like to see the bug fixed.

HDTracks and its fellow HQ download sites beg to differ. I bought Radiohead's A Moon-Shaped Pool from them because it was the only downloadable way to get it lossless and oh man does that record sound good in 48K. They have other albums available for purchase in 96K. I don't think I would buy in that format myself, as I find that my limit of quality perception goes to "lossless" and that's about it. 256K AAC is pretty good, but I like my music like it was made, lossless.

(this rantlet is not directed at you personally, G, I just sound off about higher rates every once in a while) This assumes of course that all there is to being able to measure what all humans are able to perceive with our ears is frequency response and that there is nothing more to learn about human hearing and sound perception and reproduction. Sure, 95% of people can't tell the difference between a heinous low bitrate MP3 and a pristine FLAC, but for 99% of people, "Las Meninas" is also a picture of a bunch of history-looking people standing around in a bedroom. Sayin' you might have to know what to look/listen for, and that hearing perception and acuity can possibly be learned. I say "possibly" because I am not 100% sure and I haven't performed rigorous double-blind tests. I will say that I hear the difference between 125 MP3's and FLAC's being played back in MusicBee but I failed the snot out of that NPR test thing. What it told me was that I can't tell the difference between those formats when they are delivered through a web browser. Gimme the same files and a bit-perfect music player and then see how I do. There is a wide variation in color perception and even visual acuity (look at how many people wear eyeglasses) in the human population. 4% of music students possess the innate ability to identify absolute pitch while the rest of us have to learn relative pitch. Maybe there is more to hearing perception than can be measured with a frequency counter. Why can I, at age 58 after playing in loud rock bands for years, still dig a tiny finger squeak in a guitar track out of a dense mix? I'm not saying it's so, I'm saying that I'm open to the possibility that there may be more to it than raw frequency response, and my own empirical observations suggest that there's a good chance. There may not be information up there that we can hear (and that our primitive paper-or-plastic drivers can even reproduce), but recording with the extra bandwidth may have an effect on things other than just frequency response, like phase or group delay of higher frequencies. I personally still track at 44.1, but if I were running a pro studio, and had the disk space, I might do more at 88.2 or 96 just because we can. It will give future generations more to work with if they ever dig up what we do and want to work with it. And, BTW, for the OP, the thing to do if you intend to mix down at 96 is to start the project at that rate. Otherwise, at least with Cakewalk, there is little point. Any advantage as far as plug-in sampling is already covered elsewhere in the program.

Nice clean interface. I'll add it to the Favorite Freeware Instruments Thread. I see that they are targeting it as a drum sampler, how does it perform as a general phrase sampler?

Nice work, Alan! Sounds like we might have been listening to some of the same stuff back then. I'm getting whiffs of Eno, Talking Heads, Bowie, Fripp, Belew, Nelson?

Good heavens! For decades, "disable the onboard sound" has been such a part of DAW tuning/troubleshooting folklore that whenever I've obtained a computer for DAW use, one of the first things I do is open the case, pry the Realtek chip off the MB, toss it in the outside trash, then go through any printed manuals that came with the system and cross out any reference to built-in audio.?

Has anyone heard from Meg White in a while? She might need a gig.

Requires Kontakt Retail 5.6 or newer.

MEqualizer is a truly excellent equalizer, and my go-to. If I had to choose only one parametric EQ that would be it. From any company, at any price. If you haven't already done it, Vojtech's Holiday Madness sales, when he puts everything on sale for 50% off, including all bundles, are a great time to register the Free Bundle. The deluxe features it enables aren't critical, but I like the plug-ins so much it's nice to have access to every little bell and whistle, and to give the developer his due. He just had a big one, of course, but I think he does another in the warmer months. Between MEqualizer (even in its unregistered form) and the Quadcurve EQ, I rarely reach for any other para EQ's. I like to use something like an EQ-81 type for what I call "character" EQ. Sweetening.

@Alan, I see no link to the project, and I'm curious about it. And yes, gotta post a gear list, as much as you can recall.

At least it loads and runs fine in Cakewalk when Cakewalk is running in Windows 10. I wish I could say that it were a reason for you to make the move from 7 to 10, but, um, not as far as I'm concerned. When quasi-parametrics give me the choice between dragging dots around on the curve display and turning knobs, I usually wind up turning the knobs and observing the effect on the curve display (if any). The AVA Mastering EQ kinda goes in the opposite direction where you sort of mousepaint the cuts and boosts you want around on the display until it sounds good. I can't get used to it. Or rather, I don't find its workflow compelling enough to draw me away from less annoying solutions I already have in place. I wonder if rather than the Ozone Elements or proximity eq category of giveaways that are given because they are most likely to interest the givees in the rest of the product line, AVA Mastering EQ is in the TrueVerb category of "this thing is so idiosyncratic to use we might as well just give a bunch of licenses away and hope it develops a following, like 7th Guest."

Oh, snap (to grid)!? Well, for me at least, Cakewalk by BandLab doesn't come with memories of constant random crashing. Maybe you're thinking of some other program? ?

Or as @CosmicDolphin and I pointed out, there is unused grey space where it could live in happiness without covering up the Ruler. I see no reason (other than of course coding issues unknowable to me) why it couldn't be relocated into that otherwise empty space. If it were, I might be able to read it. As it is now, I can't even read it because it's both tiny and hovering over other numbers and tick marks. @msmcleod, now that you are an official dev, d'you think there's any chance of this happening? We loves our Aim Assist Line, but Helpy The Number Bubble just seems to get in the way.

I know it's too late for Winter NAMM, but where are the Cakewalk by BandLab laptop stickers? Everybody has laptop stickers! We're almost two years into the grand experiment, it's working beyond our (or mine, anyway) wildest dreams, ain't it time to raise that universal hipster coffeehouse flag? My laptop has no stickers on it, but if they were available, I would slap a Cakewalk by BandLab one on there in an instant. And then go out to a coffeehouse just so I could be seen with it on my ancient Dell Inspiron. ?

Your username always reminds me of one of my favorite prog-pop songs, "10538 Overture." ? There sooooooo need to be Cakewalk by BandLab laptop stickers. C'mon now. Everybody has laptop stickers! I'm going to start a laptop stickers thread. I think it's a great idea for BandLab to offer print-on-demand bound Reference Guides. I've purchased several books in that format and the quality is indistinguishable from hardbacks and trade paperbacks from major publishing houses. Even though the deve-bakers are getting more aggressive about adding features, and @Morten Saether is rev'ing the Blessed Ref Guide to reflect them, a printed BRG would stay relevant for a good long while. Excellent! In the meantime, we can have things laser printed and comb or coil bound at the local FedEx-Kinko's or similar print shop. Laser printer toner is of course not water soluble and they will leave whatever margins are necessary for the format. Get a quote. You will likely be surprised at how reasonably priced it is. I'm fortunate enough to have my own monstrous HP LaserJet 8000 with duplexer, so I can crank out 2-sided pages at about 30ppm. Cost of paper only, then run it over to FedEx for binding if I want, or just sit there with my electric 3-hole punch while I watch The Expanse and stick it in a giant 3-ring binder found at curbside.

As for which one I "prefer" it's VST2 by default just because it's the most mature and widest-used technology. As for what kind of app I'd like to see get better integration with DAW's, that's always been audio editors such as Sound Forge, RX, Audacity, etc. Both of the DAW's I use now use the, brute force method of passing the raw audio file off to the external program and then reading it back with whatever changes have been made, with both programs unaware of each other. I'd love to see a protocol similar to ARA for handling this, that would allow for things like carrying over VST's and their settings between programs, minding zero-crossings, gaps, etc.

I've been making some variations to the SteamPunk theme. An attractive one, in my opinion was setting Alternative Text #2 to #E5C258FF. That sets the text colour of the Custom Module.

The thing is that yours is the first theme I've seen that liberates the theme from real life recording hardware or other software. Not that others don't exist, I just haven't noticed them. Approaching the task with the idea of trying to make it look like the control panel of a steam-powered airship that's only existed in fantasy novels is wonderful, great fun. A good theme, to my thinking, should help inspire creativity. I was shopping for a vest to complement my ensemble at the Charles Dickens Fair this year in San Francisco and the young lady helping me pointed out that in the Victorian era, there was no such thing as "too much." Here is a photo of my lovely assistant and me. Sometimes she tidies and I can't find anything! Yrs, unblinded by science, Airship Krupa....

Just an anecdotal data point: more than half of the plug-ins on my system are, like Cakewalk itself, freeware licensed. I watch KVR and when I see one that interests me I download it and try it, from any developer that offers them. I admit, I'm a free plug-in 'ho. I run no antivirus or antimalware software except for Windows Defender and Malwarebytes on an ad hoc basis. Defender and Malwarebytes have never flagged any of my plug-in downloads and I have never gotten a virus or trojan or any kind of malware from a plug-in, freeware or otherwise. It takes trouble, work, and skill to code malware into a software installer, and in the grand scheme of software, the market for freeware VST's is tiny. A black hat would probably choose a larger market to distribute their payload. And for a company to go to the trouble to create a marketing campaign such as this just so they could install some kind of trojan on our computers, or alternately, that they would go to all this trouble and then create an installer that accidentally contained malware, is, by my thinking, unlikely. What would be their gain? Ruining their reputation in the audio community for what? Companies don't need to install software to harvest our data any more, we give it up willingly. In my experience as an IT professional and as the son of a mother in her 80's who has a bunch of friends whose email addresses end in @aol.com, trojans and malware appear on people's systems not from downloading software (that ended somewhere around 1995) but from opening email attachments. Switching mom to GMail (which she loves) took care of that issue. All of which is certainly not to dissuade anyone from taking steps that keep them feeling safe, rather I seek to reassure that our computing world may not be as fraught with danger as the purveyors of anti-malware software may advertise. Antimalware solutions and common sense together are what work best for me. I see these warnings from time to time in this subforum. Have any of them ever turned out to be real trojans or virii or have they wound up being false positives that the antimalware companies eventually acknowledged?

Your themesmanship so captured my imagination that I had to visit the laboratory and engage in a bit of it myself. It occurred to me that the transport background might be fertile ground for pattern fill with a bronze or wood texture rather than the traditional solid or gradient, and then it also struck me: why not add some decoration to the lines that separate the various readouts? Just to prove the concept I started with these primitive dots at each intersection, but by jove, there's no reason a modified fleur de lis border or something more ornate wouldn't be possible! The raised Victorian lincrusta wallpaper is something I found on a royalty-free site, but the sky is the limit there as well. Do you realise what you've unleashed, man? I feel like Professor Sherman waking on the beach days before the eruption of Krakatoa to find himself in the midst of not a primitive jungle, but the most amazing inventions a secret diamond mine could fund! Dinner at Mr. I's tonight, for I love spaghetti!

I daresay old chap, I do rather like what you've done here! While it pains me to risk being perceived as detracting from such a worthy addition to the pantheon of Cakewalk themes, there is, however, one critique that gentlemanly honesty and honour I feel compel me to mention. One colour element jumps out at me as if it belongs to another paradigm. That of which I speak is our old friend 00FEFE (and its cousins 53CDF5 and 43CCAA). Hues that I have applied liberally to my own comparatively primitive efforts, when seeking to find something that will not fatigue the retina against a darker background. My own father, something of an amateur underwater explorer himself, used to fascinate me with his luminescent diving-watch. As a bedtime treat, he would remove it from his wrist and allow me to view the timepiece in complete darkness under the bedclothes. However, good sir, your backgrounds are anything but dark! On the contrary, they recall the burnished bronze and polished wood of ships moored at Greenwich awaiting the signal to set their chronometers and proceed down the timeless Estuary to whatever adventure may await beyond its mouth. If it were your intention to invoke the spirit of someone such as the balloonist-for-hire Lee Scoresby whom we may imagine accepting turquoise in payment from a Native American tribe, then I can understand the choice. However I suspect that such an association is a flight (ha!) of fancy on my part. Were that it were so easily changed, I know, my friend, from my own meagre and now abandoned efforts to create themes of my own. While the text in the Browser may be a simpler matter, the various buttons are images, and as such, a Photoshop of horrors. Would that my own pixel editor skills were up to the task, I would happily take it on, to create a black-on-bronze three-dimensional button set for this worthy theme. Sadly, I am but a GIMP when it comes to such things. Were it but a matter of colour replacement! O joy! For the time being I shall have to accept and enjoy your worthy theme as it is and for what it is, and I must say it had not occurred to me to go in such a direction with my colours! You do bring wider meaning to the term "theme" with this one, Sir Colin. Bravo.

I thought the same about de-reverb processing not too long ago. Once the technology is perfected, and applied to well-known virtuoso rock guitarists' work, o the humanity. It'll be like those "shreds" videos from a dozen years ago.

Hmm, I always do a thorough search, missed it this time, I guess. Hope it wasn"t a waste of bandwidth! I haven't tried it yet.

I find myself only ever using a gate to get hi hat out of the snare mic and snare out of the kick mic. When Boz Digital Labs came out with Gatey Watey, I picked it up as a freebie I think, or maybe it was $5. What it does is simple but ingenious, a well-designed gate that allows you to set a frequency cut-off for the gate. So you can have it still let through the freqs you want when the gate is "closed" and not affect the main signal you're working with. I know that other gates have sidechain functuons that also allow this, but with Gatey Watey, it"s just a slider.

Kontakt warning: all require the full version.