Starship Krupa

Worst case scenario: Bandlab announces that they will immediately cease development of Cakewalk and shut down all support of it including the validation server. Everything dark, everything offline, bye-bye. Noel and company are forbidden to release a last build with offline registration. Why I am not troubled about this highly unlikely scenario, off the top of my head: It gives everyone 6 months of CbB working just as it always has, to finish things up, export what they need to export, whatever. And the only crippling in Demo mode as I understand it is that it won't save projects, but it can still export. It also gives a clever anonymous 3rd-party who wishes to try 6 months to come up with their own "mechanism" to get Cakewalk out of demo mode that doesn't require BandLab Assistant contacting the validation server. There's also the most obvious fallback: setting the realtime clock on your DAW computer to fool CbB that it hasn't been 6 months since it last talked to the validation server. So I'm not losing any sleep. BandLab have so far shown no tendency toward treating their customers poorly, quite the opposite as a matter of fact. They have far exceeded expectations. I think it reasonable to believe that if they needed to discontinue Cakewalk as a product that they would do the right thing and create a last version that did not require the BandLab Assistant to validate it.

AARRGH! I hate when this happens. This thread is on page 2 already and none of us has mentioned the obvious. There is of course the IMO pretty darn good sounding Cakewalk SI-String Section that you can download for free with the BandLab Assistant. It has dozens of sampled string sections, both acoustic and synth. Some of the "synth" samples are kind of Mellotronesque if you like that sort of thing, and I do. And as a matter of fact, although I still prefer my Orchestral Companion Strings for versimilitude, if I had already had the SI-String Section I wouldn't have been looking for something else and would probably just now be buying up the Orchestral Companions for $3.99. BTW, @coffincoffee, if what you're starting with is Cakewalk by BandLab, how is it that you also have TruePiano? I thought that was a Splonar goodie?

I use that up and down bow bowing all the time time, just like Sister Ray said. ?

"Cello Sustain Up Bow" is misnamed? Wouldn't surprise me with SONiVOX. It sounds solo-y to me, but I'm not an expert. Most of them are multiples, which is what I usually want anyway. I believe the gentleman requested embiggening? That's a way to get it. Whatever, it's worth 4 bucks, innit?

Pluginboutique currently has SONiVOX' Orchestral Companion Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass each for $3.99. Get the strings at least, and the woodwinds and brass if you want to also use those. All of them have solo and ensemble samples.

You should know that InfoWorld didn't start out as the buzzword-crammed manager's delight that it became in the '90's. When it started in 1978 it was much more of a hippie futurist tabloid. It retained some of that heritage for the first 5 years of its existence. It used to be sold in health food stores. Then it was sold to a larger publishing company and that was all over. My friend Michael Swaine, one of the founding editors of InfoWorld, left to take the helm of Dr. Dobbs soon after. He unwittingly became the lyricist for my most recent song, "Half An Hour Ago...." when I set a Facebook update of his to music.

Because someone a box or two above Zombie Safe in the org chart read an exciting article in InfoWorld about how that was the wave of the future and everyone would be left behind if they didn't start doing it. ?‍♀️ One IT department I worked in back in the '90's, I swear, we fantasized about intercepting our boss' copies of InfoWorld and tossing them in the dumpster before he could read the articles and get any "great ideas." Good lord, do Vice Presidents of IT go through conditioning to have the truism "if it ain't broke don't fix it" removed from their memory?

May I ask which one? I've been a user of PCB layout software off and on for 35 years (PCAD, Eagle). The first program I used ran on an XT with a color card. That's not the case, though, with Vojtech's users. They're not all employees of companies who pay for the computers they use to accomplish a single task. And maybe they're using cross-platform DAW's, but maybe a lot of them are using Logic Pro, which is pretty popular. To look at it from my side, my DAW system is also used for video editing in Vegas Pro, editing and mastering in Sound Forge. It's my main desktop computer. I watch Netflix on it. The computer itself was a hand-me-down. To switch to another OS would mean dumping Vegas and Sound Forge. Kiss those licenses goodbye? If I were a Mac daddy (and I do own an iMac), I would probably be using Final Cut instead of Vegas Pro. So switching OS platforms would mean at least switching video NLE's, and maybe DAW's. More money for licensing, learning a completely new DAW and NLE, which I don't want to do. And the fact is, for whatever we think of it, Apple users do have that emotional connection to their Apple stuff. Apple hires people who labor over it to make it look and feel slick and cool and attractive and hip. We might think that's silly and that what matters is what work you can get done with the device, but from a business standpoint, it's counterproductive to antagonize those users. They're not going to "snap out of it." Not any more than people who like mass-produced pop music are going to stop liking it because of those "why modern music sucks" YouTube videos. I'm not saying I disagree with him. Actually I agree, I'm kind of horrified that Apple would be so stupid and abusive to their developer and user base. I've usually been of the opinion that I really like their products and detest how they treat their users and developers. This seems like a new low, and it hits a group that has stayed loyal to Apple over the decades, even at their nadir during the early '90's. A/V production never abandoned Apple. Now Apple is needlessly messing with them/us. I'm saying that my man Vojtech shouldn't take it out on his user base in public like this. It's mean and bad for business.

Your frustration is unfortunate, but the company you bought the program from went out of business a year ago. There is good news, though. BandLab bought some of their assets and as a courtesy are providing support for SONAR owners in the form of license retrieval. They have also continued to develop the code for SONAR into a superior program called Cakewalk by BandLab, which you can and should download for free now that you have a BandLab account. It will use all of the extra plug-ins that came with SONAR Platinum and not interfere with your installation of SONAR. It has a lot of features that SONAR didn't and runs better. It is not "really, really poor," you and other SONAR licensees are really, really lucky that BandLab are doing what they are doing. Without them your license would be useless and there would be no more development of the program. Get Cakewalk and don't worry about SONAR. You'll be psyched at what they've done with it.

Well, I'm curious about why using the onboard sound caused such a thing. I'm presuming that CbB grabbed either the HD chip or HDMI in the absence of his external interface. I'm using the HD chip right now on my notebook and it's working fine in WASAPI mode. It's an antique compared to Jason's. Dell i5 Latitude. It processes mouse clicks just fine.

For anyone interested, I can say that DB-33 is the Hammond B3 emulation I settled on after much testing, Hybrid 3 is a great synth for electronic dance/ambient sounds, and Vacuum Pro is my go-to for more traditional subtractive basses and pads. The rest I haven't tried. None of them has ever crashed or exhibited any bug on my setup. When I first got back into recording, I tried out a million of everything with the idea that I would pare it down to a smaller collection I could focus on, and all of the AIR stuff has made the cut. The big complaint I've seen from the AIR user community is that development seems to have halted, but in my view, these are musical instruments. They already sound great and I could choose either of the synths and spend a month just learning how to program it. It would be nice if the GUI's scaled. Of course I have to ask, Fleer, why are you dumping your AIEP3 bundle?

I think I got Xpand!2 half a dozen years ago for $1 or less and it's been a workhorse ever since. Got another license for it so that I can have it on all 4 computers in my possession. For sheer number and quality of standard sounds in a resource-friendly wallet-friendly package, nothing can touch it.

This is an oldie. Cakewalk disrespected due to not being listed on some plug-in house's official compatibility list. Here's a list of other programs that I guess aren't "relevant in the market" by that standard: Samplitude, Sequoia, Vegas, Mixcraft, MuLab, Pyramix, Cantabile, Digital Performer, ACID Pro, Mixbus, Waveform, Band-In-A-Box, Goldwave, n-Track Studio, and DaVinci Resolve, to name a few you may have heard of, and there are probably many more less prominent ones. Keep in mind that nobody at iZotope has any more access to CbB download and use numbers than you or I. All they have to go on, probably, is survey data from their dealers and their website. Also keep in mind that like it or not, CbB, as freeware, will be attracting people with little money to spend, at least at first. That iZotope list means that iZotope thinks that people who run those programs are the best investment in terms of rigorous testing in their in-house and beta compatibility programs. Every last little feature will work. And about that, haven't we just seen some work done to CbB in the area of VST preset saving? Issues that had been present for what I understand was a long time? What if iZotope noticed that there were issues in that area that Cakewalk needed to fix and weren't fixing? Whatever, if you go around examining the details of other companies' marketing specs looking for signs that Cakewalk is in danger, you'll probably eventually find some if you look hard enough, so it's probably best not to. ?

Receiving that email tainted my admiration for Vojtech and his products. All of us have probably been around long enough to remember when it was development for Windows that was the grudging afterthought for cross-platform A/V software companies. It was no fun being on the other side with the lagging releases and bug fixes and documentation that said to hit "Command" this and that. I say that if you are going to develop for whatever platform, either suck it up and deliver excellence or have the grace to do what Cakewalk Inc. did and admit that you don't really want to be MacOS developers. Sending out an email like this suggests to the user base (which is something that Meldaproduction relies on more than other companies of their type) that you're playing favorites. I've seen speculation on the user forum about future commitment, and that's no good. Microsoft's most recent major release of Windows 10 made my audio drop out and crackle, just like it did with a lot of users'. The truth is if we use Windows 10 or OSX we are all at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft. Suggesting to your customers that they change platform because one of the companies just pulled a jerk move on developers seems petty to me.

My saturation secret weapon I tend to forget even exists. It can be had for free and hides in plain sight in Meldaproduction's MEQualizer. Dry/Wet, Output, and Saturation are the controls other than the EQ-related ones. I suspect that they include the same algorithm with their other EQ plug-ins, but you can get MEQualizer for free in the Free Bundle. Of course if you don't already have the Meldaproduction Free Bundle, there are many other treats within.

I'm no expert, but I like the sound of my SONiVOX Harpsichord better than any other I've tried, and like any other SONiVOX Single, it may be had for very little money if one is willing to hunt and lay in wait. Reverb has had some great deals on SONiVOX Singles since they started carrying software licenses.

Reafir is part of the free Reaplugs bundle, and I found it quite effective it is once I got the hang of it. It's a little bit tricky at first to get the analysis profile, but just follow the instructions, and if you don't get a good one, try again. I've not used it on ambient noise like wind, but I've used it on buzz, hum, and hiss from microphones and it got them dead quiet without molesting the program material.

I have no wisdom to impart here, but I have been reading this and wondering about Mix Recall. My impulse would be to split the set into project-per-song just because it seems so unwieldy the other way, and I am wondering if one did it that way if Mic Recall can be used across projects. The idea being that yes, there should be an overall consistent sound, but individual songs may need different EQ, compression, transient shaping, etc. The players may switch instruments and so forth. So set up a mix with the most representative song, then use Mix Recall to apply it to the rest of the song/projects, with whatever tweaking is necessary. Is this doable?

I hope that non-destructive normalization comes along someday. I'm of the opinion that as few operations as possible in a DAW should be destructive. That's what freezing is for. Along those lines, I'd also like to see Undo cover everything, including console adjustments like faders, pan, muting, etc. I've slipped with the cursor during a mix and was dismayed to find that my unwanted knob adjustment wasn't in the Undo list.

filo, that's a great deal. Anyone who picks up Xpand!2 for that price (or even the $14.99 price) will be amazed at the sheer number and quality of sounds. I think the list is 2500 or so and don't know if I've made it all the way through auditioning them. Now that would be a nice thing for synth plug-in manufacturers to supply, a file that contains short auditions of each factory preset so that we don't have to go through the process of increment/noodle/increment/noodle to find our favorite sounds.

If you're going to start learning a bitmap editor, I would suggest at least downloading and installing GIMP and going through the first couple of tutorials to see if you can get a handle on it. If you can't, so be it, something simpler like MSPaint or Paint 3D come with Windows and will get this job done. GIMP can do so much that it's worth learning your way around it if you want to dabble in Cakewalk's Theme Editor once you get a taste for customization. If it ain't for you, uninstall it, it costs nothing. If all you want to do is scale an image down to 96x96 and save it as a PNG or BMP, IrfanView will do that handily and easily.

Haven't tried it yet, but I reeeeaaalllly like the logo.

Solid gold advice. When confronted with hugely varying signal levels coming from multiple virtual instruments, rather than wasting your time trying to get them in the same range, fire them all up with whatever's coming out, whether they're almost pegging your meters or barely audible, and use your ear and your creativity to make that mix happen. All that other speculation about gain staging and whatever, it's just superfluous. Who cares? It's all digital. Same with compressors and limiters. Even if you've never used them before and have no idea how they're supposed to work, or even what the function of any of the knobs is, just use your ear. Keep adjusting the controls until it sounds like you want it to. Then you're done. You think I'm kidding? Darn straight I am.

And this means what?

I knew it referred to note names, it's just that my note names are all the good ol twelve tone rather than Bass, Side Stick, Snare, etc. and I have no idea how one would get those to display. Much as I would love to try it. It's probably something obvious like editing a plain text file that associates MIDI note numbers with whatever friendly drum names I want to use and then invoking a command to apply that definition file to the track on which I wish to display the drum names.