Starship Krupa

My understanding is that if you let CbB install with its default settings, and you have a Sonar installation that was done with default settings, nothing in your existing Sonar installation will be overwritten. I don't speak from personal experience, just reading many, many accounts from forum members on the subject. The bundled MIDI and DXi plug-ins in particular are mostly or all ones that are common to both Sonar and CbB, for whatever that's worth. I started with CbB and since I've had it I have installed and uninstalled both a trial of Sonar Artist and a full version of Sonar Home Studio and all three programs coexisted happily.

This is a confusing post. What's silverlight? What switch from layers to lanes? Cakewalk by BandLab has never had anything called "layers" in all the time I've used it, and I've used it from the first week of its existence in April 2018. There are some things I don't like about the zooming logic, though, and I agree that the tracks wind up humongous when what I want to focus on is the clip or automation I'm working on. I can't figure out the logic of the horizontal zooming either, so I always wind up zooming in way to the left or right of where I want. I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just try to figure out which way CbB seems to want to go and try to "cheat" it in that direction so that I wind up somewhere near where I intended. It also drives me nuts that there's no command to zoom to the horizontal extent of a project without also filling the screen with the project vertically at the same time. So if I have a project with 2 tracks and execute the Fit Project to Screen command I wind up with these HUGE tracks.

I guess this is my chance to snag RX Elements for $29 only to have Pluginboutique run one of their deals where you get a license for $1 with any purchase a week later....?

d00d! My mixes have been languishing waiting for me to be able to look into the Volterra kernels of the plug-ins I've been using. ? Good lord, there are some things that interest me about Plug-In Doctor, but if I had it, I suspect it would be yet another thing to distract me from getting work done.

Woo, that is a nice deal on Mixcraft. I didn't know they were shipping Recording Studio with a full license for Melodyne Essentials, either, I thought you had to buy Pro Studio to get it. Mixcraft is a heckuva deal.

Do you have your gain staging dialed in? Plenty of level going in to the FX rack? Also, is it just these two FX or does it happen with any others? Do you hear the hiss with the transport stopped? Is "Cakewalk FxEq" the same as Sonitus:fx Equalizer (or Sonitus Equalizer), the paragraphic that comes with CbB?

Pluginboutique has Celemony Melodyne Essentials on sale for the next 48 hours, so jump on it if your Cakewalk copy has timed out or is about to: https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/2035

Good opportunity for Cakewalkers whose trials have timed out or are about to. https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/2035

SongKey is fun to have around because sometimes I write songs on guitar with open droning strings, 7ths and so on, and it can be a chore to figure out what key they're in. I turned the "MIDI out" feature loose on one such piece, and while it didn't do the best job of tracking, what it did put out was kind of interesting in a textural sort of way. So far I'm finding that Mk3's new tempo detection and pitch-to-MIDI aren't so great for their intended uses, but I already have way better tools for doing that in Cakewalk anyway. Saverio will probably keep working on it.

Heads-up, SongKey Mk3 in VST2 form does not play well with Cakewalk, so be sure to install only the VST3 unless you have another host that needs the VST2. If you do, go into Plug-In Manager and exclude the VST2. As soon as I add the VST2 to an FX Rack, CbB throws up a dialog and says it's gonna exit. Not so with the VST3 version. I've let Hornet know.

Cakewalk includes ProChannel as a feature, so you can easily find out for yourself by getting your own free copy and trying it. But as far as "stacking up," they're two different things. The Waves plug-in is an emulation of a hardware console strip and ProChannel is a plug-in module system. It's like asking "how does VST3 stack up against a hardware Distressor?" I've never used the Waves emulation, but I've used other emulations of the SSL channel strip and given the choice between what is available in the current ProChannel system vs. any SSL strip clone, for me, hands-down give me the ProChannel. The ProChannel comes with your choice of a convolution reverb, algo reverb, 1176-type compressor, SSL-type bus compressor, emulation of 3 different consoles including the SSL, tube saturation, 4-curve plus hi and lo pass analyzer/parametric EQ, tape machine emulation, a collection of 8 single knob FX similar to the Waves Single Knob FX that includes a gate, reverb, tremolo and transient shaper, and if you go to their sites and register for free you can get Softube's Saturation Knob and Boz Digital's Bark of Dog modules. The Waves plug-in has EQ, a compressor, and a gate/expander. This comparison suggests that ProChannel would be more versatile. Sonically, I'm pretty blown away by the modules that come with Cakewalk, but again, never tried the Waves SSL plug-in and matters of taste are what they are.

Indeed, it was 3 Euros for me! Instant purchase. Do you find that it works better? I haven't tried it yet. My first exposure to Hornet was the DrumShaper included with Computer Music, which certainly helped me out on the way to learning what I was doing with processing, drum-wise. They do pretty well at getting an instant drum sound, but more importantly, he included a sheet telling what's "under the hood." As in the compressor and EQ settings that are being affected when you turn the knobs. I studied that and copied the settings to discrete plug-ins, which was a good starting point for learning how to do it on my own.

I hear ya. But the hosts will have to get their game on, then, eh? It's just disappointing that with all of Steinberg's blather about how revolutionary the new spec is, I have never, and likely will never, notice a difference from having my plug-in be written to conform to one spec or the other, except at the moment Acoustica still haven't gotten Mixcraft straightened out with VST3 support, IMO. It's just more trouble for developers and apparently saved the Cubase/Nuendo engineers the work of implementing a couple of features that other DAW's already had. Marketing: "Can you lads put in audio routing between plug-ins like Sonar and all these other DAW's have? The young people like to do this thing called 'side chaining.'" Engineering: "That would be really hard and nobody wants it. Young people only use pirated Ableton Live. Please leave us alone." Marketing: "How about resizable GUI's? Our own VST spec calls for it and everyone else is doing it already." Engineering: "You are very annoying and should leave now." Marketing: "How can we get these features? Aha! We control the VST spec, we can force the plug-in developers to add it themselves!" I can think of lots of cool things to have in a plug-in spec myself, like better protection from having the plug-in crash the host, maybe some way for different instances of the same plug-in to share resources so if you have 15 tracks, each with the same compressor, they can be more efficient, specifications for how to have a plug-in use the resources of other networked computers for processing, more uniform standards for latency reporting, standards for gain staging and level matching, and so forth.

Oh, thank you. Just because I don't like installers that install 32-bit plug-ins on my 64-bit system so I then need to go find them and remove them so that some over-eager host program doesn't find them during a scan. How about hosts that claim to support both, but I only trust the VST2 support? Mixcraft likes to fall down and go boom if I load VST3's up. So far I have yet to notice any of the supposed benefits the VST3 spec allows for or even see a plug-in or host developer (other than Steinberg) claim that they are taking advantage of it. There are even those who say that the introduction of the VST3 spec was mostly a boondoggle on the part of Steinberg to get plug-in manufacturers to make up for Cubase and Nuendo's inability to make audio routing between plug-ins work. Also GUI resizing on the Windows versions, which was not a problem for anyone else.

I wish I could eliminate them entirely, but there are a couple where the developer left the game before 64-bit was a thing, and then there are some manufacturers like g-Sonique who are lagging behind. I have their VTD-42 Psychedelic Delay that was licensed by Acoustica for Mixcraft Pro Studio and it just does things that nothing else does. I hope Acoustica get the 64-bit one in the next release cycle, but for now, I'm kinda stuck with it. Then there is the steady trickle of new single-developer freeware VST's that are announced at KVR, developed using SynthEdit or Flowstone and 32-bit only.

Since the thread has expanded a bit to include pitch correctors in general, I'm curious to know if anyone's messed about with Meldaproduction's MAutopitch. The only pitch correction I've used for a finished product was Melodyne Essentials to do a bit of "drag the blobs around" here and there, one with some vocal tracks and then on a bass guitar track where the player just hit the wrong note, so it's kind of an undiscovered country for me. My understanding is that there are two ways of doing it, one where you tell the corrector what to do and it listens to the track and processes it as it goes along, and then the way I did it with Melodyne where you go "clam" digging and drag individual botched notes into the correct pitch, add or correct vibrato, etc. Do I have that right?

Whoa. "Honor your partner/Then parade/Now get lost in this masquerade!" And everybody has masks they hold up when the caller says the line? That sounds pretty awesome. An acquaintance of mine, square dance caller, I never thought he was quite cut out for it, he had the look and manner of a family therapist. I always wanted him to say something like "hold your partner/swing and sway/how are we/feeling today?"

I don't understand how this is not the desired effect. To clarify: you are recording in Comping Mode, you are trying to punch in a section, you have Auto Punch selected, with Mute Previous Takes checked, and you can still hear the first take and all subsequent punched takes? Or you can't hear them and you want to? Or you can't hear your other tracks? Or your clips are all muted when you're done and you can't figure out how to un-mute them?

Doesn't Melodyne do what V-Vocal did?

My understanding is that "null tests" are performed by recording simple stereo and mono sine waves into a single channel, then rendering them. This leaves out two very important elements! First, playback. That is what we hear when we are playing back a file or a mix or whatever through our computer's speakers in real time, and it's handled through a different engine than rendering. This is HUGE, and a HUGE thing to just hand wave and ignore. Think of how many plug-ins have settings that allow you to separately set the quality for "normal" and "rendering." That's because they know the difference between the two states of the host. When I came to Cakewalk from Mixcraft my biggest culture shock was beginning to see the Audio Engine as this separate thing that starts and stops, and sometimes stalls out and you have to lean over it and pull the cord and get it going again like a lawnmower. Turns out that Acoustica are very thrifty with playback compared to Cakewalk by BandLab. I did some poking around with Resource Monitor and found that on my same 4-minute song, one that I started in Mixcraft, exported as stems, then continued in Cakewalk, Mixcraft is not streaming anything from the disk to play it back. Nothing at all. It must be very quickly, during downtime, analyzing and loading the whole thing into memory to stream it, and to do that, it may be compromising the quality. To be sure, it does some other smart stuff that I would like to see Cakewalk also do, like ignoring files that are only associated with muted clips, but Mixcraft ain't streamin' nothin' from the drive to begin with so who knows how they're doing it. The null-test ding-dongs, as far as I've seen, ignore this crucial fact: playback ain't rendering. Second, and perhaps even more critical, summing/mixing. There has to be some algorithm(s) to handle the mixing together of multiple audio streams, and programming decisions must be made, it's never going to be a simple 1:1. If there is some way to do a "null test" on taking 5 sine waves and summing them all together into the Master Bus center panned, I haven't heard about it. And think of 5 different audio streams, one of them panned 50% left, the other 50% left, one at -7dB, etc. Those are all things that fall outside the realm of simple reproduction of 1's and 0's, and there are no rules for how to implement that under the hood. What happens when a signal hits the mix engine too hot? Something has to happen. Hard clip, soft clip? After this, of course, there must be programming to handle connection of effects, on and on, it can all sound different depending on who is doing the coding and what decisions they make. So unless all that the null testers are doing with their DAW's is recording single tracks of audio and then rendering the same with no panning, no effects, none of that, and they don't care how their DAW's sound while they're mixing on them, then "null tests" are beside the point. All they do is prove one single thing, that the DAW accurately renders a single track of uneffected audio. Which a DAW should do, to be sure, but there are lots of other things that set them apart from each other sonically. And BTW, check out this site: http://src.infinitewave.ca/ Unfortunately it hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it shows that there are, or were, plenty of digital audio programs that couldn't handle the simple task of converting a 96KHz sine to a 44.1KHz sine. Some of those plots are nasty looking. So not even all rendering engines do a perfect job of it. I can say this: Mixcraft does a lot of things way more easily than Cakewalk. It's taken me a long time to get Cakewalk working as well, a long time, especially with comping and those fiddly tools and the bugs in loop recording. But when I imported my first set of stems (see, rendered stems, the Mixcraft rendering engine sounds great) into Cakewalk from Mixcraft and set up a rough mix and heard how freaking great it sounded when I hit Play, I didn't care how often I had to restart the damn thing, I was going to get it happening in Cakewalk no matter what because it sounded like I wanted my mixing experience to sound. The sound of playback was such an improvement over Mixcraft. There was a smoothness, less "grainy" somehow. That and the fact that I got a decent mix going in a matter of hours with just the ProChannel FX ?.

Wikipedia's ARA page has now been updated to reflect the facts that Cakewalk by BandLab has always had support for ARA ? and that it supports ARA2 as of release 2019.05. (Cakewalk and SONAR's representation in Wikipedia seems to have always been rather dire. I've spent hours sorting out some of the most garbled grammar, confused timelines, incorrect punctuation, outright misinformation and unintentional vandalism I've ever seen in relation to a topic on that platform, and there are still no entries for either CbB or BandLab)

Woo-hoo! BTW, the Tech Specs section on Cakewalk's product page hasn't yet been updated to reflect the newly-implemented ARA2 support: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk The world must know! I think CbB is in a small minority at this point, isn't it? I will be updating the Wikipedia ARA2 page shortly to add CbB to the list of DAW's that support it....

Oh, right, you mean those who believe that for some reason it's inherently not possible for the software methods that two different programs use to mix together multiple streams of digital audio and deliver them to the ear to make an audible difference? Because, "digital?" I should think the challenge would be to get multiple programs all doing that to sound reasonably similar, that is to sound like a good hardware mixing board doing the same thing.

(Yahooie, the return of Steev! Master of hyperbole, and I mean that with all due respect and affection. I'm glad you're back, my man, 'cause a friend of mine is looking to buy a computer for DAW use and I need yer experteez) As for whether BandLab know how many users of Cakewalk there are, yes they do, rather accurately thanks to BandLab Assistant. Cakewalk isn't just downloaded, people have to register and activate it, and then re-activate it at least once every 6 months. So they know exactly how many people are actually installing it and then continuing to use it. Months ago during one of our silly discussions about the licensing model, I came to the realization that Cakewalk is really licensed under a free subscription. The subscription requires that the user contact BandLab's licensing servers via the Assistant at least once every 6 months for a re-activation. As for market share and positioning, the features that we have seen get attention now that the program is known as Cakewalk seem oriented toward audio recording, don't they? With the change in stretching and pitch algorithms, the work on Melodyne integration? BandLab's other DAW's, the iOS, Android, and web-based ones kind of have the loop-y thing covered, so maybe Cakewalk development is going to be focused more on audio features for a while. This would suit me, as audio recording is where I'm at right now. Although it might amuse you, @Craig Anderton, to know that I'm 58 and have been doing songwriting, playing, and audio recording for most of my musical career, playing in bands and solo, for 35 years or so. But I've been getting more and more interested in composing and producing electronic music, whether introducing elements of it into my other stuff a la LCD Soundsystem, Postal Service, and Air, or going full on a la Daft Punk and Perfume. So I'm heading the opposite direction from the kids you know, learning how to sidechain my kick drum and set up TAL Vocoder. Fortunately, my other DAW is Mixcraft Pro Studio. The only problem is that Cakewalk's playback engine has spoiled me. It just sounds so. Freaking. Good. And the console view in Mixcraft is....well, I won't say it because I like those guys, but I will say I find it mostly unusable and leave it at that.

I think he said that he signed in to his account and everything was there. Happy time! There might have been some confusion between Cakewalk Sonar, Cakewalk by BandLab, a Cakewalk account, and a BandLab account. Have you ever been asked to renew your "membership?" Via a red warning and a blue warning? I have not seen these. The license for CbB is a subscription requiring renewal at least once every 6 months via the BandLab Assistant contacting BandLab's activation servers. The OP got it figured out. For anyone else reading this: connect computer to Internet. Start BandLab Assistant. Follow prompts. Enjoy renewed license.