Starship Krupa

Regarding Meldaproduction plug-ins, I asked Vojtech about this, and he said that for whatever reason, he had neglected to do this from the start with his plug-ins, which made it impossible to go back and fix it, so it's a feature that will apparently forever be missing in Melda-Land. Since I have 38 of his plug-ins (I upgraded the Free Bundle), it kind of makes it a pain in the ***** when both versions pop up in the Cakewalk pick-lists. What I do is use the Plug-In Manager to manually disable the VST2 versions of all Meldaproduction and any other plug-ins that don't implement the feature.

Tread carefully regarding the legacy of Ray Thomas within range of my typing fingers. ? I've been a Moody Blues fan since high school, and my high school career was in the late '70's, not exactly during their heyday. By rights, I should have been in The Kiss Army I, too, once subscribed to the theory that Ray fit into the "he doesn't have a lead vocal or flute solo on this one, so give him a tambourine so he has something to do onstage" rock paradigm. But a few years ago as I assembled a MB library of the 2006 remasters and started listening critically, sometimes on headphones, I started to marvel at how thoughtfully and how prominently Ray's tambourine was integrated into the arrangements of many of their songs, especially the uptempo ones. Of course I hadn't noticed it before because it's so well integrated, it fits so well. Mellotron, check, flute, check, tambourine, check. Listen to "Ride My See-Saw" or "Lovely to See You" or "Question" and try to imagine them without the tambourine. A really cool effect they used that I want to swipe someday was how they have Ray double Justin's strumming rhythm on "Question." That tambourine kept the Moodies grounded in their beat group origins, helped keep them accessible when other prog rock bands lost touch. Most musicians would love to have that "half a career." So there.

I sure as hell am, mostly right here in this forum. You would be amazed at the number of posts by people who make it all the way through the process of discovering that the old Cakewalk company's forum is locked, registering an account with BandLab, navigating through the popups and dialogs telling about CbB, only to get to this forum and post about how they're running Sonar X1 or whatever and having some technical issue. Or they come in and post asking in earnestness whether they should even try CbB. They are not sure whether their bundled plug-ins will still be available, etc. And, once again, we reassure them that CbB installs right alongside, works great, very similar except more features and faster and more stable, and you get to keep your existing bundled plug-ins and installation of Sonar. No risk. I've asked, no, begged, for a sticky on this topic, so far to no avail. I just hate to see all these people missing out on something that's such an improvement.

Okay, for anyone who is having trouble with this plug-in, I vastly simplified the routing over what that guy on YouTube does with his Aux track and all that mess. Just make two instrument tracks, one for Instachord and one for the synth you want to control with Instachord. Configure Instachord's Input to your MIDI keyboard. Enable MIDI output in Instachord. In Instachord's Output, go to Selected Track Outputs... and choose MIDI, and select the synth you want to control. In the synth you want to control, set your Input to Instachord. I had to set it to Ch. 1 to get it to work with the Virtual Controller, but YMMV. And that's it. Just 4 steps. No Aux Track, no Sends, none of that weird crap Mr. YouTube has you do. I'm still kinda underwhelmed. You select a chord with the left hand and then get all notey with the right hand. Maybe I took too many piano lessons for this to seem like a big deal, or maybe I just need to fart around with it. I already know how to improvise over a scale. It's kinda fun, but not OH MY GAWD THIS IS A GAME CHANGER.

So far I can't even get the damn thing to do what it's supposed to do. I play keys on my MIDI keyboard, and they light up on the Instachord plug-in, and I hear the notes coming from TTS-1, but the whole chord and picking and strum thing just doesn't happen. I press a key or keys in the "Chord A" or "Chord B" zone, then a key or keys in the "Picks" zone, and all I get is TTS-1 playing the piano notes you would expect to hear from pressing down those keys. I know that Instachord is listening because the key presses are showing up in its GUI. I'm pretty sure the routing is correct because I can click on the Instachord GUI's keyboard and the piano will sound. I've tried loading presets and it doesn't change anything. There's this one guy who goes on about this thing in his YouTube video as if it's the cure for cancer. Then he presses a key with his left hand, a chord sounds, presses another key with his right hand and an arpeggio plays. Well, I can play a chord with my left hand and a simple arpeggio with my right hand. This is not revolutionary. I used to have a Yamaha home organ from the '80's that could do this.

I got Instachord and Instascale in the 2-fer bundle deal that Pluginboutique were running a few months back and just now got around to trying out Instachord. I've run into two main issues with it. The first I think I've solved with the help of a YouTube video, and that was how to route it in Cakewalk. Kinda convoluted, but I have it to where I play my MIDI keyboard, the Instachord plug-in's onscreen keys light up, and sounds come out of TTS-1. The second is trickier, and that is I can't quite figure out WTF the thing is supposed to do, apart from making a few people on YouTube super excited that they own a copy. ? From what I can make out based on their gesticulations, it enables you to play arpeggios with only 2 fingers while you talk about music theory. I can't figure out how to switch it into the mode where it plays the arpeggios in the first place, and the manual is little help. If that's all there is to this thing I'm going to be a little bummed because I didn't really need a payware arpeggiator, especially one that you need to apply music theory to set up.

I think Sergey's kind effort to contribute belonged in The Feedback Loop.

Not permitted by whom? Which entity enforces this agreement?

Cakewalk: The Vanishing was a known issue and it was investigated. There's another thread about it around here somewhere. I think pwalpal found it. I was seeing it, but the most recent version seems to have cured it. You say "one of," are you on the most recent build? Make sure you are. Fire up your BandLab Assistant and let it do its thing. It was pretty chilling. Very unusual behavior for a Windows 10 program, to just disappear like that without throwing an error message.

New computer day for Robert! I don't even know what an NVME drive is (I'm going to be jazzed when I can finally pull the 7200 drive in my i5 Dell Inspiron notebook and swap it for an SSD), but here's to having THREE of them. ?

Apologies, then, I thought that discussions of other DAW's and how they stack up as far as popularity and user base and so on fit in with the topic. No more Reaper madness. That's one of the odd things in the DAW world, it's never been possible to know for sure how many people are using what, it's always been anecdotal. With CbB and the BandLab Assistant, BandLab can get pretty accurate tracking of who is sticking with the program. If they renew the license, they're likely using it. It's not like other freeware where all they know is how many times it's been downloaded.

Nor is any other software. The term has little to do with the product itself, although by nature the product must be one that is less popular than mainstream offerings. The term mostly referred to advocacy behaviors on the part of a user base, and was coined mostly to piss off such advocates and provide the rest of us with a way to let off steam. Popping their heads up in online discussions about other programs to say that everyone involved should try XYZ because it's way better, never admitting to any shortcomings on the part of XYZ no matter how obvious. Basically the belief that if we all clap really loud to show how much we believe in XYZ we can create a sustainable market share for it. Reaper's fanbase seems to have settled down, perhaps as the program itself has become useful enough to keep them occupied making music with it. A friend of mine says that if one wants to do live sound work, Reaper's versatility in routing will make one quite happy. I think that the company has done a great job, and seems to pay attention to what the users request, which is always smart. The most important thing is that they have shown that their licensing model can work. I suppose I'll keep giving it a try every couple of years. I've always been rooting for them to succeed.

I too experience this, with SampleTank 3. Both VST2 and VST3 versions lock up after a certain amount of time.

Hmm, the Cakewalk start delay symptom. I won't call it a bug at this point because that implies a single cause. Symptom was that when I started the transport for any operation, be it Record or Play, there was an ever-increasing lag. I have had a transport lag issue in the past, nasty one. In my case, I theorized that it had something to do with all the unused audio clips that were streaming from the disk, so I started culling them from my Take Lanes and the problem went away. But the project where it was most persisten was a mixed MIDI/audio project now that I think of it, and I wonder if I was looking in the wrong place, that it might have had something to do with the MIDI tracks. It was worst on a project that was solely audio, though. There have been a couple of times where I hit Record and it didn't start recording at all, but that's not enough times to call it anything other than a glitch or even operator error.

@chrismohr 53 tones? Interesting. Condolences on the loss of your friend. Being of the geek persuasion myself I'm very curious what about your system "breaks" if you try to use it with a later version of Sonar or CbB. I assume that it's a combined hardware and software system. Are there plug-ins or external programs that are having a hard time coexisting with Sonar/CbB? Hardware? Cakewalk's legendary scripting? If you stick around and ask and answer a few questions, maybe the forum hive mind could help get it so that your system is not tied to just this one dot-release of a defunct program. It seems a shame if you could no longer do your specialized composing work using this system that you and your friend probably put a lot of effort into setting up. One thing: you say that your "computer" died. By that do you mean that the system disk and the drive (if different) where your installation of Sonar X2.2 reside were rendered unreadable? If not, you may be able to improve your situation by removing the drive(s) and installing them in a working system, at least just long enough to make backups.

For the benefit of these inquiries that come up from time to time here, and people who wonder about the consequences of possibly misusing their installation media for old versions of Sonar, I'd like to point some things out. None of it, as you will see if you (not likely) read it is legal advice, and I'm not a lawyer. It's mostly stuff that everyone knows but doesn't stop to consider. If someone has greater knowledge of IP, contract, and civil law and anything I say isn't true, please let me know. (James, this isn't directed at you specifically, more anyone who's pondering what they might do in this situation) When it comes to software, typically what the license agreement covers is the use of the ones and zeroes on the media, not the media itself, except for using it in ways that encourage illegal copying. In other words, you can't mount the disk as a network share and put it on the Internet for people to download, you can't burn copies for people to use to make unlicensed installations, etc. The OP (presumably) purchased a license to use the program. Software EULA's even back then typically didn't come with any prohibitions regarding what could be done with the physical media the program came on, merely the contents of it. Usually, there was language explicitly permitting these contents to be backed up (backing up of media became a consumer right granted by a court decision). Unless Sonar had unusual language in its licensing agreement, there should not have been any prohibition against using the installation media to install a copy of the software for the purpose of activating it with another legal license. If such were the case, then companies who purchased multiple copies would have been presumably bound by it to maintain all their original installation media and implement tracking to make sure that each originally-supplied CD-ROM was used to install the program on one single licensed workstation at a time. When I was still working my IT day job 20 years ago I knew of no software that didn't allow for sharing a copy of the installation media among multiple computers as long as the target computer was licensed to use the contents. Activation may have depended on information encoded into the media, but again, 20 years ago I knew of no company, especially not in consumer software, that was still doing this. This means that you can use your installation media any way you wish, as colorful shiny mobiles, drink coasters, to install multiple legally-licensed copies in your studio complex, whatever, just never for installing unlicensed or improperly licensed copies of its contents. Next, even if it could somehow be shown to be against the terms of the license agreement to use the media (or a copy of its contents) for the purpose of installing a legally licensed copy on a 3rd parties computer, that wouldn't make it "illegal" in the same way that shoplifting or stealing a car is illegal. By which I mean that if some law enforcement agency somehow learned about someone doing it ("stealing SONAR? I think you want to talk to the FCC or Coast Guard about that"), they would not take steps to prevent it or punish it. The injured party (presumably the now-defunct Cakewalk, Inc.) would have to lawyer up and take them to court to obtain whatever damages they thought they were entitled to. In a case of the action being against the EULA, that might be the list price of a single seat license plus whatever attorney's fees. Any decent defense attorney would make mincemeat out of the plaintiffs on the basis that no harm whatsoever was done, therefore, no damages. No court is going to make someone pay damages because they helped someone out whose hard drive and the company that made their installation media died. The current owners of the Cakewalk and Sonar brands and most of the intellectual property on the disc give away the main part of it for free. For the bundled software, the situation would be the same as described above (except probably with even fewer restrictions): they don't care as long as the installation is legal, and if they did, they would have to find out about your misdeed, hunt you down, and take you to a court that would promptly throw the whole thing out. If all of the oddball things somehow happened, someone was taken to court by ZombieCakewalk Inc. and lost, they'd be told to pay what the court decided and that's it. No criminal record, no cops hunting them down. And when I say "be told to pay," that's all the court does. Tells the losing party they are obligated to pay. It falls back to the winning party to actually try to collect. (BandLab could maybe theoretically take someone to court over a broken Sonar license, but given the current licensing scheme for Cakewalk, that seems....unlikely) That's what I have to say about possible legal consequences. As far as moral questions? The company that wrote the agreement no longer exists. People who bought their licenses expecting not to have to worry about losing their media because Cakewalk, Inc. had been around for 20 years already and didn't seem to be going anywhere are who I'd consider to have taken a beating. The EULA, if it did have language preventing legal installations to 3rd-party computers, and it probably didn't, was written under the assumption that situations like this would never occur, that someone like the OP would be able to phone up and get a replacement disk for a nominal fee. That, of course, is no longer true.

Yes, thanks, that's what I want. The information box obscures the information I most want to see when I'm using it. It's too minute for me to read, and it covers up the numbers on the Timeline Ruler. I already know how to turn the Aim Assist line on and off. I want it there, but not obscuring the Ruler numbers. (I guess I need to watch the tl in my posts)

Cool, thanks! I guess I need to install AutoHotkey in order to try it? I'm not familiar with the program.

I just tried setting the global lens to none, and the issue went away. Whether it comes back, we shall see. And to answer Mark's inquiry, I have "Track View Control Order" unchecked.

No, this is not part of an "arranger track." That belongs over in the Big Feature Request pen with the Chord Track and other big things. This is a small feature request. I just want to be able to change the color of individual markers. Same markers, just with colors that can be changed, like we have other things whose colors can be changed. All fun, no tears, no feature creep, no fists and yelling over "how DAW X does it," just a color picker added to the current properties. If we are good and do not fight in the car while coming home from getting our color-y markers, maybe they will consider our Big Feature requests.

Thanks for taking the trouble to help ease my confusion, Lynn. I get that it's supposed to mimic "taping over" previously recorded material, what I don't understand is what happens to the underlying WAV files that are getting "erased." I know the clips go away, I've seen that in action, but what about the actual recorded data? Is it a destructive process? Okay, so it is to avoid hassle, for people who, once they nail a take, they know they are only going to want to use that last one, and don't want to retain any previous takes for comping purposes or anything else. And it is, as I suspected, a dangerous thing to turn on, because you yourself have accidentally "overwritten" stuff that you had intended to keep. Tradeoff between convenience and safety, I suppose. One of the reasons I wasn't sure about it is because in most cases I do wish to keep a few previous takes for possible comping (I'm not an accomplished enough player and singer to expect full-length flub-free takes with regularity and certainty), and the extra trouble of culling unwanted clips (one click per take if I just delete the whole lane) is worth it for safety purposes. I'm absent-minded enough that Overwrite mode would make quick work of any previously-recorded material, so much so that after having it on for a couple of hours, all of my lanes on every track would have been replaced by howls, screams, and swearing. By "erase unused tracks," I assume you mean deleting lanes (and the clips in them) containing unwanted takes. What do you mean by "flattening" a track? Cakewalk has a way to flatten a comped track, where it moves the various clips that make up a comped track into one lane, but it sounds like you're working with full takes in this situation, not comped ones.

In your examples above, wouldn't Comping mode also give you the exact same results as Overwrite mode? One thing is, you mention this is while you have Auto Punch engaged, which I only turn on when I'm punching in. You have it set to Mute Previous Takes, thereby nullifying Sound on Sound's main characteristic, which is allowing you to play or sing along with the previous take(s). In my experience, where you would experience a whole lot of difference with Overwrite mode vs. the other two is if at any point in the tracking process you manually stopped the transport and restarted it. Then Overwrite would start acting like like The Reaper. No, not REAPER, but The Grim Reaper, in that whatever you had recorded previously would now be done away with as the new tracking advanced. In the initial tracking process, Overwrite acts just like Comping mode, and it will happily stack take after take into new lane after new lane as I let it loop away. Overwrite creates new empty lanes, and it treats empty lanes just like Comping mode does, it records into them. Where Comping mode differs is that if there's already a lane there with data in it, Comping mode politely creates a new lane for it and leaves the existing data alone. Overwrite seizes the lane for its own and plows through whatever was there. They also differ in that when tracking stops, if the last take is shorter than its predecessors, with Comping mode the previous takes will be split into two clips along the right edge of the last take. Sometimes other unfortunate things will happen, and there used to be more of them and they were worse, but then some of them were determined to be bugs and those were fixed so it's better now.

Mark, if you also don't quite "get" Overwrite mode, I definitely feel better about my own confusion. And looking forward to your findings. It's not lost on me that the first person I've seen who seems to have experience with overwrite mode says that being in that mode by accident caused them to lose data.

Was this just with a single project? In my case it was, a project I have been working on for over a year, so lots of deletions and undo steps.

I love the Aim Assist Line, in the absence of marker tails/vertical rulers, it is one of the tools I always have switched on to help me line things up, see where my clicks are going to land when I have snap enabled. My enhancement request is for the position readout part of it, and the most basic enhancement would just be the ability to turn it off. I wouldn't mind it, might even find it useful if it didn't obscure the timeline ruler numbers, thereby rendering it worse than useless to me by making it so that I can never be sure exactly where the Aim Assist Line really is. Because the numbers in the Aim Assist Line readout are so tiny, and their size fixed, I have never been able to read them very well, especially when they are crowded in amongst other ruler elements. Because the numbers go all the way out to the very last tiniest measurement, the digits cover up the digits on the timeline ruler that I would normally rely on. So what I wind up with is "indecipherable blob obscuring my timeline ruler numbers." Even when I tried adding rulers to try to get the thing into clear air, it just popped up yet another display, right on top of the other rulers' digits. I've tried different colors, but as long as the line is legible in the Track view, the readout will obscure my ruler digits. It might be nice to be able to change the size of its numbers, but what I really want is the ability to make it stop, go away, leave me in peace. Either that or let me position it above the digits, in that grey empty space where only the playhead ever goes. Its numbers, if allowed to float up there in uncluttered space, might become legible to me.