Starship Krupa

Yeah, it's a pain, other audio programs I use that uses ASIO drivers have the ability to take what the PreSonus driver is giving it and translate that into "Input 1, Input 2, Input 3, Input 4, etc." I've never bothered to say anything to either party because on the PreSonus side, the drivers for my Firebox and Firepods will never be touched again, and on the Cakewalk side, I suspect "we list what the driver reports" would be the end of it, they have bigger fish to fry. You can at least rename them in the Devices list.

Wow, so sorry to hear this. I used to love those cheap breakfast buffets. And I, too clicked on this thinking it would have something to do with MAGIX taking the program over from Sony, and I was preparing to tell you that you just need to configure MAGIX Connect so that it stops showing you ads for their products that you already own. And, BTW, I just upgraded from 10 to 15 via the Humble Bundle and they really went to town on that code. Vegas, the tourist trap, might have jumped the shark, but Vegas, the video editing software, has acquired that feel of speed and stabillity that Cakewalk is sporting these days. And you don't even need to take "grandpa's special vitamins" to enjoy it!

I get ya, and I know it chafes when I toss out a good feature request and get offered a lame kluge in response that only proves the need for the feature. So I'll try not to be lame. Cakewalk is such a huge beast that as you no doubt know, "feature request" around here often turns into "it can actually already do that." So to answer your question, no, I would not find it useful. Here's why: I do what you do every time I finalize a mix and can tell you how I set it up. In addition to the Events and Alesae in my sig, I also have a pair of Boston A70's connected to the FP10 so I was psyched when I figured out that Cakewalk could do this. In Mixcraft, it's way clumsier. Change things just a little and I think referencing will become much simpler. 1. Create a stereo bus called Output 2. Route everything you would normally route to the HW out to Output 3. As you mix and want to reference on different speakers, route Output to whichever HW out you wish to use at the moment No more running around chasing down every track and bus that's routed to the HW output, everything will always be routed to Output (which you will rout to your HW out). It will be 2 mouse clicks away. This is what I do and it works a treat. From what I can see, we're essentially doing the same thing that Wavelab is doing, putting another software layer in right before the output. Again, if I have it wrong and this wouldn't work for you, let me know.

I've had to read your post several times to try to figure out how you might be switching speakers now and how you would like it to work more easily and quickly. With my setup, I have 4 sets of speakers, plus headphones also connected to the same output as 1+2. My interface has 10 outputs, and these outputs drive amplifier/speaker combinations, so I switch outputs at a software level, which is what I assume you want to do. What I usually do is go to the In/Out panel on my Master bus strip and switch to the appropriate output from there. That's two mouse clicks. Is that what you mean by "manually?" The change works on the fly, but there is sometimes a brief gap in playback. I adjust the levels in the Hardware Outs to compensate for any differences in the amplifier or speaker levels. Can you be more specific about how you're switching outputs now, and why it's not working for you? What you are trying to accomplish may already be doable with sends and/or buses like Mark suggests. Let's see....I just set up my Master bus with its Output set to "none" and a Send to each hardware output. All I have to do to switch to any output I want is enable the appropriate Send. Does that work for your use case?

That is a nice interface, but heavens, the Geneva.

(Don't want to be a party pooper, but shouldn't this be in the Coffee House or something?) I'm a pro amp tech and designer, and have lost count of the number of Hot Rod/Blues DeLuxe/Villes I've had through my shop in the past 15 years. Basically yes to most or all of what @Tubeydude says, but I find that with good jack hygiene, which on those amps means looping your cable through the handle on top to act as a strain relief, the nylon input jacks are just fine. At this age, and with those symptoms, the power tubes are suspect and should be swapped out by a tech who can properly set the bias for you. As for the power supply caps, in the mid 2000's, China's manufacturers had a massive problem that affected many brands of electrolytic capacitors, including Illinois, the supplier of the caps for Fender's tube amps (The common failure mode of LCD TV's and monitors where they come on for 10 seconds and then go back off is due to the cap cootie problem, and most of those TV's and monitors can be repaired with $10 worth of caps. Yes, all those 52" TV's that are sitting in landfills....). That's why Tubeydude has seen those poor Illinois fail after only a few years, and I'll bet they had that crud that looks like Gorilla Glue oozing out of them. Any current manufacture electrolytic capacitor, even generic, will likely last at least 30 years in that application. I see 40 year old caps in Fender Twins that are still holding on, and electrolytic caps, China crisis aside, are not in the category of things that used to be made better than they are now, quite the contrary. Materials science and manufacturing have advanced greatly in the past several decades. And yes, the power resistors for the 15V rails should be checked, as they do melt their own solder joints. I think they're 470 ohms standard and I started stocking 500 ohms to swap them out with, which cools things down and still provides plenty of current. I'm not familiar with the Rock Crusher, but aren't attenuators supposed to attenuate? I kid, but this one sounds like something's gone wrong and I hope the manufacturer of the device can set you up with a manual and expected behavior and all that. They do put a strain on your power tubes. Oh, and whatever you put in there, I suggest you make sure that whatever the labeling, it's made by Sovtek/EH/New Sensor. Sound great and last a long time. They make the tubes for Fender/Groove Tubes.

? I'm not familiar with this plug-in, but I'm surprised that you'd be using a 32-bit player when there are modern 64-bit options like TX16w and Garritan Aria Player available at no cost. Aria Player requires a bit of spelunking to obtain, which I can help with if you are interested. I think it's based on open source code, so they have to give it away, but they don't make it easy.

Curious: which 'verb plug are you using? I know it shouldn't matter, but then, CbB shouldn't be locking up when you sidechain the compressor. Maybe there's a specific reverb that doesn't like being next door to that compressor while it's being sidechained.

I doubt it's an incompatibility with the update, as there are hundreds of notebooks with Realtek HD chips that function perfectly with CbB, including mine, running the latest version. The forum would be exploding with this issue. It's not out of the question for an update to expose another issue in your configuration, but then that's what we're looking for anyway. My only thoughts at this point is that you really need to load up a project that works and go into Preferences and comb through every setting, no matter how trivial it may seem, especially on the drivers and devices and MIDI pages, and note any discrepancies between what you find there and what appears when you start a new project. Look for the slightest difference in nomenclature, like "Headphone" instead of "Headphone HD" or anything. You can even screen cap each one with the Windows Snipping Tool, just type Snip into your Search Bar and it will come up. Then you can call them up side-by-side for comparison. It could be that you have some audio in your old projects that is setting the chip to a friendly rate/depth, I don't know. Also, make sure that you're testing using the most vanilla of synths! Fire up TTS-1 and blorp around on it, or the SI-Bass or String Section or Electric Piano or something absolutely known to work with CbB. Don't load up a Reaktor ensemble or Massive or something. BTW, if you can figure out how to do it, it's friendly etiquette to post your system specs in your sig, look down at mine for an example. That way you don't have to keep answering questions about how much RAM, what processor, version of Windows,, etc.

Just spent a goodly amount of time going through most of the sounds in the bundle and while each of the packages, true to the quality level I've come to expect from AAS, has plenty of gems, Cinémathéque for me is worth more than what I paid for the whole bundle. It got me planning a '70's Tomita/Phillip Glass/Vangelis instrumental synth concept album I'm going to make using them. Or at least a Mort Garson Music For Plants/Black Mass by Lucifer/Signs of the Zodiac record.

Oh, I think we have a winner. Way to go @RobertWS.

You don't say whether you did it as an upgrade or a fresh install, but I found out that it does make a big difference. Microsoft allow you the option of "Fresh Start" so that even if you did it as an upgrade, you can go the fresh install route. Also, 4G RAM is absolute minimum, 8G if you want to be okay. I run Cakewalk on Windows 10 Pro just fine on an old Dell i5 laptop with 8G of RAM, so what you're trying to do is not out of the question.

A properly acoustically treated one with as few standing wave nodes as possible. Yes, this deal kicks some serious AAS, and I recommend tappin' it while it's still out there.

That would be the best spent $49 in plug-ins I could possibly think of for someone who didn't already have them. Man, to have had Ozone and Neutron Elements 5 years ago when I was struggling to get things to sound okay and piling on the plug-ins willy-nilly on each channel would have been such an education. Boom, here's a tool with just an EQ, a compressor, and an exciter, and it's going to make your track sound like gold. Boom, same thing on the Master bus. Limiter, EQ, Spatializer. Wham, your mix sounds 100% better. Their genius of iZotope for me is in the gorgeous UI's, the integration of the suites, and the killer presets (and wizards, for the ones that have them). They provide such good starting points.

You put instances of it on each track you want to manage with the Visual Mixer, then those tracks appear on the grid in the Visual Mixer. I think it's used for other things if you have higher versions of the iZotope Suites, but that's the most basic.

Man, this is an odd one. The only thing I can think of is that there might be a Realtek HD control panel somewhere that is doing some processing and getting in the way. Look in the system tray, poke around, search in Cortana for HD Audio, Realtek, etc. and if you find something like that, make sure that any processing is disabled. They especially love to enhance the bass, which is what you're having trouble with. I'm starting to think that your best bet may be to create a template by deleting all the data from one of your existing projects that loads okay and just start your new projects from that! BTW, I use the onboard sound in my Dell Inspiron notebook for monitoring both through headphones and through powered monitors, and as long as I'm using WASAPI or ASIO4ALL, it sounds fine. Perfectly suitable for DAW monitoring, and I am very picky about things like bit perfect audio playback. All you're doing is mixing, not recording, right? The thing to avoid is getting the Windows resampling between your DAW and the chip, so WASAPI Exclusive or ASIO4ALL is the way to go. Windows resampling smears the transients like MP3 conversion. I've even, as an experiment, connected a small Yamaha mixer to the line in and done some recording just to see if I could get a halfway decent sound, and I did. Not as good as my PreSonus interfaces, but the Yamaha preamps were doing the heavy lifting and I used a nice condenser mic and people might be surprised to learn how it was recorded.

They can run side-by-side, but only on the same drive.

Finally! I saw it in time to snag a license!

What do Antares have to say about their product not being compatible with Cakewalk by BandLab? Compatibility issues are something that ideally require participation from both companies. Failing to test their software with a DAW that has been around for 31 years and is available to them for free? Seems kind of sloppy to me. I see that Sonar Platinum (along with FL Studio, Reaper, and Digital Performer) is listed as "possibly compatible" with Autotune EFX on their website and that for all "possibly compatible" listed hosts the user should try their free demo to see if it works. I guess "possibly compatible" means that they want the user to do their compatibility testing for them. In case anyone doesn't know how the industry works, ImageLine, Cockos and MOTU (and MAGIX, as I see that Samplitude is on the doesn't work list) would all be more than happy to give them copies of their latest builds to test their plug-ins with. Even if it were only to be able to tell users that they don't work, or to let the companies know. From their compatibility list, Antares seem to be interested in Pro Tools, Cubase, and Studio One, and sometimes Ableton Live, and everyone else can fend for themselves. Get your license fee back.

Do you mean Sonar or Cakewalk by BandLab? If the former, go download the BandLab Assistant and get Cakewalk by BandLab. Sonar is old, unsupported stuff. It's fine to keep around for the plug-ins that came with it, but Cakewalk is way ahead in features, stability, and speed. You need to tell us whether you're using ASIO4ALL, WDM, WASAPI Exclusive, WASAPI Shared, or what as your audio driver. Also, you can get further information by right clicking on the speaker icon in your Windows system tray and selecting Open Sound Settings, and from the resulting page, select Device Properties. From there, you can select Additional Device Properties, then Properties again, Change Settings, keep drilling down until you see how your sound chip is actually set up to operate with Windows. It should be set at 24 bits 44, 100 for running with Cakewalk.

This is a known issue, and one that the developers have been trying to track down and correct. It has been difficult, as it does not happen on every system. @Noel Borthwick might like to take a look at a .cwb file of your project to see if the developers can track down what is causing the problem, so please Save As in this format. You might be of help to the process of fixing this. Are you using the very latest version of Cakewalk by BandLab?

You should check. It's at least been updated to the v10 core, don't know about the algorithm. I think I noticed in the release notes that it got some update having to do with supporting surround mixing. It has been solid as a rock on everything I've used it on since I first got it for free on that Black Friday giveaway years ago. I didn't like it at first because I thought it was too complicated, but then I figured out how to work with it in bozo mode and then some of the subtleties came through. The manual just confused the heck out of me because of the front and back thing, I was new to reverb and couldn't get a handle on it with all the controls. Turns out I didn't really need to work all of the controls if I didn't want to, just the usual size, early ref, etc. My complaint at the time was that it didn't come with enough preset examples to demonstrate what the manual was trying to explain, even with the "celebrity" ones I downloaded from the Waves site. Now I just dial in a nice hall or room sound and use it as a send like I do any other reverb and it sounds nice, sparkly and full, yet natural and neutral if I want it to be. It scales back well. I might delve into using the advanced features someday, but for now it's just a great-sounding algo reverb.

I wish I could unconditionally recommend SongKey. I've gotten some use out of it, certainly my discounted money's worth. With my complex, ringing guitar chords, it hasn't "done what it says on the tin." I'll say that it has helped me figure out the key of some of my weird songs, but as far as doing it all by itself, not really. It can pick out the individual notes I'm playing, which saves time on dissecting my big droning chords. I'm glad Saverio made it so the display freezes when you pause the transport. @Grem, I recall you're a big fan of LU Meter, which I see is on sale for €2.00. I have a few fancy LUFS meters like dpMeter4, MLoudnessAnalyzer and YouLean, does LU Meter do anything that these other LU meters don't? Obviously the money is nothing, it's just that I already have over 500 plug-ins, and LUFS is one of those things that is still kind of confusing for me, so another metering plug-in is something I'm cautious about acquiring.

Seems fishy to me.

It looks like Avid are turning their backs on the hobbyist and semi-pro segment and focusing on the stratosphere a la Sequoia and Pyramix. They know where their money is coming in from, I don't. This might signify that they acknowledge that so many in that segment have already turned to Logic, Cubase, Cakewalk, Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reaper, Samplitude, Waveform, Mixcraft et al that there's no sense in them trying to compete there. Is the DAWniverse split into these two segments: one where the users use the DAW as a music creation tool, composing, editing, recording, looping, making beats, singing, rapping, sampling, all that, and then another where the DAW is used strictly for recording, editing, mixing and mastering? From looking at the marketing pages for Sequoia and Pyramix, it would seem that way. Maybe Avid wants Pro Tools in that segment rather than bundling AIR softsynths and trying to come up with a performance panel or cloning some feature from Ableton Live, licensing loop packs, etc. If that market is lucrative enough, I actually think that might make sense for them, despite the traumatic effect it would have on the Pro Tools users in the other segment. Obviously, We Who Have Time To Post On Forums skew toward the hobbyist/semi-pro DAW-as-composing-tool segment, so we would tend to think it would be a shame for them to make such a move. What say ye?