Starship Krupa

By a fluke, I had/have a registered account with the Cakewalk, Inc. zombieservers. Back in 2015 I took them up on a free offer of the CA/2A compressor plug-in. In the years since CbB shipped I was able to parlay that account into a SONAR Home Studio license via an old offer they once ran with a magazine, and installed/uninstalled some demos and so have expanded CbB with Rapture Session (and a bunch of Rapture Pro sounds) and other content from the defunct Cakewalk, Inc. I am helpless against defects in the uninstall process. Helpless I tell you. So I've played the lite verson, and it sounds so good I agree that Rapture Pro would be a shame to just leave sitting on the servers. And I wholeheartedly agree that any PC modules should be released from captivity ASAP. Rapture Session would be a nice thing to let loose, to go with the Si Series instruments.

Johnny, I'm the user who started the thread that Brian linked to, and easy answer: just go register an account at IK Multimedia and get Sampletank 4 CS Free, then go to A|A|S and download Swatches and you'll have enough freeware sampled and modeled instrument content to keep you going for weeks, at which point go to Native Instruments and grab Komplete Start for free and get several more weeks' worth. Swatches has some great modeled guitars from A|A|S' Strum GS instrument. There's a point to what I'm saying beyond just getting you good sounds, which is that while BandLab could look for partners to bundle the kind of instruments you're talking about, at this point, just in the 2 years since the birth of Cakewalk by BandLab the music software picture has changed to the point that I'm not so sure that bundled instruments are as important as they once were. BandLab offer 4 freeware licensed DAW's. That's just one company. Too many other companies to list offer freeware plug-ins. I don't mean just one-person hobby coders and 2nd-tier outfits either, you can get freeware instruments and FX from industry powerhouses like the ones I mentioned earlier, plus iZotope, Meldaproduction, Steinberg.... CbB comes with TTS-1, which still works, still has some serviceable pianos and drumkits, and it comes with the Studio Instruments bundle. Piano, strings, drums, bass, it's enough to get someone started with writing songs and arranging.

Back when we were closer to the DOS era, I used to be able to tell a computer person who had spent time doing phone support because they would say "asterisk period asterisk" rather than "star dot star." You would learn (without being told) on your first day on the phones never to say "star dot star," nor to say "just press any key." You say "press Enter." Things would go more smoothly and calls would be resolved more quickly. Other sample phrase from that time: "backslash, that's the one that leans to the left." Seriously, though, Helos' experience, even in the face of being given instructions, serves to illustrate that a new user (rightly) expects the object itself to give clues as to how to perform important operations on itself. Having to memorize keystrokes just ain't fair play in 2020. The user base has long been requesting that markers of color be represented in the Cakewalk timeline. Observing the design of the Arranger View, it seems obvious that the current product management understands the value of color-coding different sections and events in a project so I'm hoping that we'll see it soon.

So bumpworthy, though. I just bought my second license.

I agree that it's needlessly obscure. Should be in the right-click context menu but it ain't.

This is my strategy for when I've started the mix and then wanted to lay down new parts, which is just about always. That's because of how I like to work when doing my own songs. Usually by the time I get a keeper take on any given instrument, I don't have much "musician" left in me, but I often have plenty of "mixing engineer" so I'll start messing with getting a happening preliminary drum mix, setting up the sidechain between bass and kick, mixing the "khorus o'Krupas" backing vocals I just recorded, whatever. For whatever reason, my first impulse to lighten the CPU load isn't to freeze, it's to hit the global FX button.

Go into Preferences, and under Audio/Configuration File, check to see what the ThreadSchedulingModel is set to. Should be 2 or 1 on your system. If it's set to 3 for some reason, that can cause these very symptoms. @Mark Morgon-Shaw, thanks for the link to the info about Microsoft messing with the Firewire drivers. I use a Firewire interface with Windows 10. I don't wish to stop doing so any time soon as long as Microsoft doesn't break its functionality. So far, PreSonus and Dell have held up their ends of the bargain, it's up to Microsoft not to foul up and make a very nice piece of audio equipment "obsolete."

Ah, thank you, lads. For any other nervous persons, you do have to get all the way to the payment page and then click on the aforementioned light blue link to get the box to open up. And then put in freesmasher20 and you don't have to give them your PayPal or credit card information. Now my drumbz overzheadsh will thundurrr....

So, how do I get it for free? I followed the link, and the page says it's 100% off, and I get all the way to registering an account and putting it in my cart, but it's still sitting there at 49 euros. Does it change to zero at some point? I must say, that demo audio where they put it on the drum overheads is pretty ferocious. At this point, my thing is finding one or two emulations of each of the classics and sticking with them, but I am a free plug-in 'ho.

Oh, no, I am really digging SampleTank 4 CS. Lots of useful free content, and it doesn't crash hosts like 3 did. Stick a cheapo nVidia card in that thing? Remember this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/950683/vcredist-from-vc-2008-installs-temporary-files-in-root-directory. Vojtech loves to run that Visual C++ runtime installer and it leaves that scat behind in the root. BTW, don't know if I've seen it mentioned, but he's letting everyone subscribe to the whole Meldaproduction catalog for 3 months for free. I'm getting to see what all the fuss is about with the more expensive stuff.

It's the principle, kite. ? I'm a Meldamoonie, All Hail The Grand Vojtech, but even The Great One cannot force me to keep 32-bit plug-ins on my SSD. Regarding NI, on my systems, it makes me install them both anew and then I have to delete the 32-bit one all over again. Worth it. Principle. Also, what I said about confusing hosts' scanners. Every host maintains a database of every plug-it scans, and these scans take time at start-up. If I have an idea, I want to get it down quickly. Also, speaking of NI cruft, their installer puts the drivers for their hardware controllers on your system whether you own the controllers or not. So that's another cleanup task I do from time to time, check with Process Explorer to see if I have the NI drivers running and go in and disable them if I do.

OMG, thank you! On my system, it just had the AASplayer .dll, but that is craziness. It does lend credence to my hypothesis that their installer just looks for the string "vstplugins" and slaps copies of the .dll's in the folder. Or who knows, maybe it has a database? All known plug-in locations. I think I'm going to start a spreadsheet or some other way to start tracking this, because it's not good to have multiple copies of plug-ins scattered all over the place. You need to make sure that your DAW is scanning the correct one in the correct order, and the VST thing is weird enough without confusing matters. I have my system's policy down to: 64-bit VST3's only when they are available, then 64-bit VST2's when the VST3 is not. That's just for tidiness's sake, not out of any preference for the silly VST3 format. Everything else is search and delete. Duplicate VST2's when I already have the VST3 installed included. So far I have run into zero issues with just deleting the spurious VST2 .dll's, 32-bit versions, AAX versions, RTAS(!) versions that these installers dump on my precious SSD. I'm shopping for a 500G SSD right now, but I still don't care for shovelware in any form, from any source. I'll take their install shell, that's all in the game, but I'd really rather it didn't make me hunt down and delete all the "trial" copies of their entire catalog (cough T-Racks cough).

Reminds me I need to write a post-Melda installer cleanup script to delete all the 32-bit cruft. The more challenging task will be the post A|A|S installer script. If ever there were a nervous nellie installer....

True, and I am a frugal hobbyist who has never paid more than $50 for any software license. The reason I am in this conversation to begin with is that the Cakewalk license is a free subscription. If I were a professional user of Pro Tools and UAD plug-ins and owned an iLok dongle I might have different thoughts on downtime I also have multiple systems in one location that in a pinch, I can deauthorize licenses from if need be. Something that irks me is that I've seen PACE hawking that "Zero Downtime" service, which I assume is basically some scheme for storing backups of your licenses in a cloud. In this day, if they have the means to do that, they should have just implemented it for free. Otherwise it's basically saying "pay us extra for this service or be exposed to the inherent risks of using our licensing process." Still, if iLok weren't an effective form of copy protection, these companies wouldn't use it. It's a lock, and I do agree with the truism that locks are there to deter honest people. You are correct in saying that cracked software will always exist no matter what companies do in the way of copy protection. However, "sending your friend a copy of the iZotopeRX installer to try out that he somehow never gets around to registering" and "having XPand! 2 casually copied from the DAW class computer by every student who takes the class" (yes, it's a $15 plug-in, but 1,000 people take the class, so....) can be prevented because these are people whose moral event horizon stops before the act of searching out a torrent site, taking the risk of malware, etc. Of course when companies whose revenue is mostly from selling licenses get paid for the highest percentage of copies of their software in use, they don't have to charge as much for their licenses. This results in a direct benefit to you and me in the form of less expensive licenses. So I pay for all the value I get from AIR's plug-ins not getting passed around like party coasters in the form of taking the risk of possible hassle. Yes, there are other ways to license plug-ins, challenge and response, for instance, but they are also vulnerable to disk failure, they don't allow for the license owner easily moving from system to system (if I had an iLok dongle, I could buy a single license for a plug-in and use it on as many systems as I could sit down at, right?), etc.

As we've witnessed with Our Favorite DAW, if you judge a piece of software/technology by how buggy it was during the early Obama administration, you're sure to miss out on some great stuff. If I were to go by Sampletank 3, for instance, I'd never touch the thing again, because despite the freebie having one of the best sampled grands I'd heard, I could play it for about 3 minutes before it would crash the snot out of whatever host I was using, Cakewalk, Mixcraft. But I checked out Sampletank 4, and dang, even more freebie content and the thing is strong like bull, solid like rock. And I'm sorry, SONAR lovers, but when I installed and tried the first build of CbB, I was kind of stunned by how crashy and fragile and dropout prone and just buggy it was compared to what I had been used to, which was Mixcraft. Usable, for sure, great features and it sounded like a million bucks, but I had to baby it. Couldn't leave it running. But the next build, what was it, a month and a half later, those boys had put their butt-kicking boots on. By the next one after that, I was convinced that they were deadly serious. And now, I think y'all know what an advocate I am. I'm an "East German judge" of software, I used to work in the industry, I have a low threshold for excuses and defensiveness. I also think that it's great that we have so many DAW's to choose from, and even the highest end of them costs less than my 4-track cassette did 35 years ago. Ableton Live! and FL Studio have great workflows for electronic music, Reaper is a tweaker's delight and seems to work with everything when others don't, Cubase and Studio One seem to be ones with the more traditional workflow and at the forefront of introducing new features, Cakewalk is free and to me, like a Winchester Mystery House where I keep finding out cool things it can do, and it's now taking some inspiration again from what the industry leaders are up to.

What's the big deal about iLok licensing? The PACE service is a teeny tiny thing running on my computer compared to Apple Mobile Device Helper, Apple iPod Service, Apple Updater, Google Crash Handler, Microsoft Photos, all this other crap I have running and can't turn off for fear it will break iTunes or Chrome. I did have to go through the hassle of retrieving the iLok'd licenses I lost on a computer where I upgraded the motherboard and Windows (and therefore PACE/iLok) decided that it was a different computer. I contacted the companies involved and asked them to please deactivate the licenses and they all did without a fuss. Next time I do major surgery on a computer, I deactivate the iLok (and Waves) licenses first. Never owned one of their dongles, 'cause I don't hop from studio to studio to work.

I remember being a little kid and as I started to understand how the world functioned, that it wasn't Mommy's Magic Purse, you had to get paid in order to be able to do things, watching TV and having this sudden moment of panic and confusion when I realized that the people doing it were giving it away for free. And I was really freaked out, like little kids get when they don't understand something that's really important to them. I grew up in Los Angeles, I understood from an early age that movies and TV cost a lot of money to produce, yet TV was free. I couldn't ask anyone because I didn't want to seem stupid. Finally it dawned on me: the commercials. The people who run the commercials pay the people who do the shows to run the commercials. But for that time period before I got it, I was really freaked out, I felt like I was in danger of losing something that was central to my life. Like, what if these people who are doing it for free decide that they're tired of it? No more Laugh-In, no more Star Trek? Maybe we have a basic urge to understand and feel comfortable with the supply chain of things that are important to us. It's probably in our DNA. (There's also a lot of conditioning about "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." And lemme tell ya, when I heard that SONAR was about to be renamed and released under a freeware license, it was like, "pinch me, I must be dreaming." It is an incredible deal. How is it even possible? Even for the abandoned SONAR people, to suddenly have a savior swoop in and continue the updates. Too good to be true. So what's the catch? When does it all go sour?) The funny thing is, Laugh-In and Star Trek were cancelled, and SONAR, hate to use the word, but it failed as a commercial product and is thriving like a mo-fo as freeware. So under the business model that was more easily understood, the program tanked, yet 2 years into the new business model, which has shown no signs of trouble, premiering a huge new feature just in time for everyone to stay home and learn how to use it, some people are still kinda twitchy. As a favorite character on Star Trek might say, I find it....fascinating.

I'm sorry, I just can't resist sometimes, it's become a compulsion. Showing the light to people who use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox to express doubt that there's any way a company could have a plan for making money from their 4 free DAW's.... I'll just go sing a poor boy's song....

Oh my, I'm happy to say that I went to Pluginboutique to check out the #StayInCreate package of freebies, you know, Neutron Elements 3, the Producertech courses, Radio plug-in, Loopmasters content, and I had Neutron Elements 3 in my cart and looked down below and what to my eyes should appear but they have a "You might also be interested in...." that included yet another iZotope/Exponential plug-in, Excalibur, for $9.99. I didn't even bother to trial it, after my experience with Phoenix Verb I knew that whatever that guy at Exponential came up with, it would be worth the tenner for at least one license, which would also qualify me for the little Denise trifle that's this month's PB freebie. And oh heck yeah it is. I guess it's supposed to be a sort of like those old digital multiFX rack units. So the promotion worked just like it was supposed to, I bought a product from the company that was giving another one away for free. (another piece of the puzzle for those who might still be wondering "how can BandLab possibly ever make money on Cakewalk if they give it away for free?")

I have been interested in it, y'know, every so often you hear something really cool and it's an interesting idea to be able to go back in time 30 seconds and capture it for study/use. I still have too many old school shackles on my head to just outright nick someone else's sound or groove, but I don't have a problem with putting it under the microscope to figure out what made it tickle my fancy. Listening to it right now. First impressions....sounds pretty good despite WASAPI and ASIO being absent from audio output choices....lack of search function for finding stations is needlessly frustrating....hmmm, pasting SomaFM stream addresses results in "station offline" error messages, but the same stations load okay from their preset menu....can't find a way to examine their presets to see what a "good" address looks like. Kinda rough around the corners, sort of looks like development stopped at some point. Verdict: worth every penny, glad I have it, glad I didn't pay more.

I just trash them, and I've had no problems. If you want to play it safe, and I do recommend playing it safe, you can create a folder on another drive called "32 VST Hold" or whatever, and drag them there temporarily until you are sure that there are no unintended consequences. I've never seen it, but it's not 100% impossible that the 64-bit version of a plug-in could be using the 32-bit .dll as a resource or something.

Anyone else develop a resentment for Audified after jumping through all those hoops to download and register their tarted-up compressorwhatsit? They seem to kinda think they're hot doo-doo or something....

I have never gotten that, I guess I'm more stoic than you, or too busy writing my notoriously long-winded replies, but while we're on the topic of reactions, y'know how we all have our "Member's total reputation?" (huh-huh, huh-huh) I wanna know which reactions add and subtract to it so I don't accidentally step on some member's reputation when I didn't mean to. I'm free with the Like, because I really do think that anyone who participates in a discussion, especially new people who might be afraid to, contribute to it. Also the Thanks and the Good Idea when appropriate. But if someone posts about John Prine passing away and I react "Sad," I would hope that doesn't ding them, and similarly, if they were to post that, say, Pro Tools added pop-out channel strip plug-ins and Avid were crowing about how innovative that was, and I reacted "Meh," I wouldn't want that to ding them. Even if someone were to post that they only use WASAPI instead of ASIO because they had done A/B testing and it sounded better and I reacted "Confused," I still wouldn't want it to lower their reputation. I'm pretty sure that "Meh" is the "downvote," so I reserve that for people posting words in all capitals commanding that the developers get their act together or whatever, but I wanna know, I really wanna know. Not that anyone in this topic doesn't have rep to friggin' burn, I notice.

For me, the quest had always been for my single best go-to reverb that I could put on a send and it would sound the most like sending the track to a real or imagined 3-D space. I'd have that, and then a quiver of "character" reverbs like plate emulations, psychedelic space things, etc. When Phoenix first went on sale at PB for a tenner, I downloaded the demo, threw it on my send bus in an existing mix just with the default medium room preset and my search of 5 years came to a very abrupt halt as my mix expanded into this holographic soundstage. Yeah, forget it, every other room reverb. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that you might be able to do something as good with TrueVerb or one of Melda's M*Verbs, but preset after preset in this thing was just stunning. No grain in the tails, and I don't know what kind of processing he's throwing in there to get that spatial effect, but man oh man. In other words, get the dang thing, if you are in any way in the market for an algorithmic room/hall/chamber reverb. But you can test drive it first and see. Caveat: unlike most iZotope products, license allows for a single installation, not two. Also, the UI is not as pretty as its iZotope brethren.

I don't think my Firepods qualify me for this....?