Starship Krupa

This issue must be something that is occurring when the Channel Emulator is used in a certain way. If it weren't, the forum would be full of complaints and the development team and beta testers would have noticed it a long time ago. The Console Emulation is a commonly used module. There must be a plug-in, module, way of routing, something that is happening on your system. If it's a bug, it's one that's exposed in combination with these other factors, so please post more about what other plug-ins and ProChannel modules you are using, where the track is routed, etc. The Console Emulator adds a bit of gain, so it may even be that the gain inherent to the module is causing something to go into oscillation. It also has its own resonant peak.

I think it's becoming clear from the responses in this thread that reverb, depending on how it's applied can be both a special effect and a means of creating a virtual space, even in the same mix. I tend toward creating the virtual space, because I like to end up with mixes where I can close my eyes and picture just such a virtual space with everything placed in it. Having said that, I loved Robin Guthrie's production with Cocteau Twins where everything was just doused in reverb. I turn off synths' internal reverbs because I find they muddy things up, especially VSTi's that are based on sampled instruments.

One big feature that Cakewalk by BandLab is still lacking, in my opinion, especially for EDM work, is inclusion of a software phrase sampler. While there are a few choices out there, the one I've found that's closest in functionality and workflow to the ones I'm used to in other DAW's is TX16Wx. It has such a rich feature set that I'll probably never delve deeply enough to really find out what all it can do, but it quickly and easily does the bit where you get some phrases in there and trigger them with MIDI information, and that's what I want my phrase sampler to do. It has good tools for editing and pitch shifting as well, so I look nowhere else. They recently updated it with a bunch of new features like a more scaleable GUI.

Also, don't get a copy of Eckhardt Tolle's The Power of Now expecting it to have anything to do with Cakewalk.

If you can list as much of your system specifications as possible, as I have done in my signature, it would be most helpful. OS, processor, audio interface, disk(s), RAM, etc. In this case, I'd like to know what kind of disk(s) you have and how you have them set up. SSD? Spinny? 7200RPM? One single drive? Projects on one, system and programs on the other? We don't know what operating system you are using. Windows 7, 8, 10? How much RAM? Since you mention that the problem has gotten worse over time, it suggests to me that it might be helped by defragmenting the hard drive where your projects are stored, if the drive is not an SSD. Your PreSonus AudioBox is a fine interface and should be able to run in ASIO mode, and since that is the optimum mode for it, my first order of business would be to get it working in ASIO mode. If you can't get it working in ASIO or WASAPI mode, it indicates that there are problems elsewhere that need to be corrected before you proceed. MME is a "last resort" to be used for legacy and oddball hardware, not currently supported products like your AudioBox. You won't get full capacity from your interface running it in MME mode. It's like running your car with half of the spark plugs removed.

I agree, but my hope for now is that they'll be "virtual stickies," that is, people will keep finding good freeware and posting them, which will bump the thread to the top. And if we keep the quality of the recommendations high, and stay on topic, we may very well wind up getting stickied anyway. Or the content may be used in a sticky. Maybe there is so much great freeware available that you can get close to putting together your own "Cakewalk Platinum" by substituting freeware for the premium content. Maybe not, but it's a fun idea. Cakewalk Aluminum, maybe? This, for sure. I see people asking about where to find a good Rhodes or drum kit or strings plug-in, and wonder if they've even tried them. The Rhodes is really good, the drum kit is good if you go through the sounds and find the sampled kit you like and then fiddle with the onboard FX and most importantly for any canned drums, mess with your velocities! Especially on the hi hat. The strings are good enough that I might not have bought the Sonivox Orchestral Companion if I had already had them. One of the problems with the Studio Instruments may be the interface, which I find makes it difficult to audition the soundsets. It's not immediately clear how to get at all the different kits or basses or pianos or string sounds. The Strings for instance, has synth pads and other different samples included, not just the default chamber orchestra, the Bass has synth basses, acoustic, fretless, and so on. There are at least a dozen different sampled drum kits, both acoustic and electronic.

These are some great links! Who needs a sticky when this keeps getting the bump? Of course I cheat it a bit by not posting the masses of links like mibby did! Boz Digital Labs has some good stuff, especially Bark of Dog, which is a bass management/enhancement tool that used to ship with Sonar Platinum as a ProChannel module. It's now up to Bark of Dog 2, which unfortunately doesn't come in a ProChannel module format. Boz is a good guy, though, and if you tell him that you're running CbB and ask him nicely, he might let you download the original, which will install both the VST and the ProChannel module. Another note about the Computer Music plug-ins, one of them is Sidewidener by Boz Digital and Joey Sturgis Tones, and it is my hands-down favorite way to stereoize and enhance mono sources like iPhone recordings. One challenge I take on for fun is to take mono rehearsal recordings, like where someone set their phone down at band practice, and polish them up as best I can using things like Sidewidener, iZotope RX, proximity eq+, iZotope Neutron's transient shaper and so forth. My friends marvel at the results and it's a fun challenge and a good way to learn what the tools are capable of. Sidewidener is the best.

Since the freeware FX thread is doing well, how about we have one for instruments? Razor already mentioned the huge collection available free for registering with Native Instruments, and I followed up with the free Kontakt drum instrument DrumMic'a. If you're into combo organs, the first two I recommend are Combo V and Combo F, excellent modeled Vox and Farfisa organs. The developer went on to work for Arturia and expanded both of them into commercial products. Dead Duck Software, mentioned in the Free FX thread, first released instruments that were the classic mda instruments with nice GUI's, one of which is one of my favorite Rhodes emulations, then came up with their own original synthesizer for last year's KVR competition. Laptop Musician Blog recently released a trio of cool tiny ROMplers, my favorite of which is Padspheres, sort of an ambient-in-a-box. There are also a couple of treated pianos. That's all for now, just a taste to prime the pump. All of my suggestions are going to be 64-bit and thoroughly tested with Cakewalk. The freeware repositories are littered with 32-bit VSTi's thanks to Synthedit having been a dominant development tool for so long, but I no longer even bother with them due to the extra overhead and extra potential for issues. Cakewalk is a 64-bit host and I suspect the developers are no longer paying much attention to compatibility with legacy 32-bit plug-ins. As you will see, there is a cornucopia of 64-bit freeware.

Just basic audio editing, I guess. Getting rid of spikes and clicks.

I should set this up. I have both Sound Forge and RX Elements. Anyone tried both of them and have a preference? I've been using Sound Forge outside Cakewalk and like it well enough, just haven't messed with RX much.

The stuff that Native Instruments gives away for free? Just crazy. They're more about instruments than FX, so I guess we should have another thread? And on a related topic, since it uses the Kontakt Player from NI, my favorite sampled drum plug-in, Sennheiser DrumMic'a. It really belongs in another thread, because it's an instrument, not an effect. DrumMic'a is a Kontakt Instrument that Sennheiser released several years ago as a demonstration of the use of their microphones for recording drums. To register and download it, you need to complete the process on a German website, but it's not hard to figure out how to fill in the blanks to get your registration code. It's very powerful, has its own mixer, allows you to use individual outputs for each of the 8 microphones, to try different microphones for each drum and overheads, bypass the internal mixer's processing, etc. They must have spent a fortune on the thing, but it works as they intended, it's an effective demo of how their mics work on drums and I hope it has sold a lot of product over the years. I've fooled some experienced ears with it. Unfortunately, DrumMic'a is no longer free due to some licensing changes between NI and Sennheiser.

My complaint about the Antress Modern collection is that contrary to the name, all the ones I saw were 32-bit. The Tokyo Dawn Records freeware plug-ins have an amazing amount of functionality, although I still haven't gotten my poor head around Proximity! And yes, just as with Klanghelm and Meldaproduction, you will probably end up shelling out for the extra features. But the thing is, in all these cases, you aren't shelling out that much, and these developers deserve the heck out of it for putting up tools that broke folks can use without being tempted to use cracked plugs. As a matter of fact, I don't know if the whole "cracked plugs" thing is even what it was 10 or 15 years ago, which may be down to the freeware scene. Why bother with cracked Waves or Softube or whatever and take the virus/trojan risks associated with downloading cracked software when there's so much legit stuff available for free? There's a really inexpensive way to get access to all of the Computer Music plug-ins to date, and that's to purchase a digital single issue of the magazine, which last time I checked was about $4 at Pocketmags. There's usually enough reading material in one issue to last about a year, too. You get the plug-in that goes with the issue you buy, and then all of the plug-ins from previous issues, which to date totals around 90.

If it is possible in your location, try using Google Chrome only for this, instead of Brave. I, too, had trouble with authorization using the browser Firefox, but then I switched to Chrome only long enough to register, get the BandLab Assistant working, and download Cakewalk. Since then, everything works fine with Firefox. If you must use a high-security browser, perhaps you can try one other than Brave. I hope that my suggestions are of help to you and I wish you luck.

Also, if you already have the old Sonar and you leave it installed when you install Cakewalk by BandLab, you should be able to use all of your Sonar ProChannel and VST plug-ins. If for some reason you are not, open a service ticket or just ask here in the forum. It's usually an easy fix, as easy as setting a path in Preferences.

This is sounding familiar. For anyone with this issue, I suggest increasing ASIO driver's buffers to see if it helps. I'm having vague memories of my transport getting balky on a project and jacking up my driver buffers fixed it when I was very new to Cakewalk. If it helps, please let it be known so that everyone can benefit and the developers can work on it. Increasing the buffers would be a workaround, which is all well and good, but the program should be the boss of the driver, not the other way around. This suggests to me that while the program is still polling control surfaces, it's given up polling the GUI and the keyboard. Educated guess is that it's about servicing interrupts, and what priority the program gives to which ones. Surely it would need to pay as much attention as possible to I/O in order to allow the lowest latency, and I imagine that paying attention to the GUI is an "expensive" activity. It has to update status and maybe put the program into a different mode and pop a window every time the cursor goes over a different hot spot, of which there are many. I can't see the keyboard as such, though, all the program has to do is sit and wait for input, just like with a control surface.

Yes, and you should post about it in the forum section that's dedicated to talking all about creating themes with the Theme Editor. People who read that section would be glad to see it, and if you have any questions about creating themes, there are some experienced people there: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/31-ui-themes/

That is a beef I have in general with Cakewalk, that it lets you type in your "own" filenames and paths and then overrides them in more than one place. And, please, Captains Obvious, do not chime in and tell me the design philosophy behind this.

This. Even if you want to blow off steam in the forum, it's helpful to add this, because members of the dev and beta teams read the forum. Bugs may seem random, but often they are not as random as they seemed at first if you keep your awareness up while you are watching for them to manifest. With the spacebar transport control bug, you say that it only happens after you start and stop it many times. How many, and are there certain activities in between the starts and stops? Is it with audio projects, MIDI, mixed? Projects with certain plug-ins? Melodyne? People outside the development process think that finding bugs is easier than it actually is. We can't just tell a developer "sometimes I can't stop the transport with the spacebar" and expect them to read through the code and "oh, I see, there it is, that's where the code has a problem!" It takes a team of people to find something like this, and the first step, always, is figuring out how to get it to manifest 100% of the time, and that's where you can help.

Yes, I watched it when they first posted it back in April of 2018. And some people still don't get that all of their extra Sonar content is compatible with Cakewalk, that they coexist side-by-side, etc.

Yeah, now I understand why they ignored my request for a sticky.

For sure, one can ruin things pretty good with an EQ. Most of them these days seem to have some coloration designed in, like the buttons in the Quad Curve. My preferred one is "E." There sure are a lot of Pultec emulations out there. If there are any MEqualizer users reading this who haven't tried the "Saturation" knob, give it a try. Typical Vojtech, he doesn't make a big deal out of it, but it's one of my favorite saturation effects.

Oh, the eternal drawback to Meldaproduction's plug-ins. You put it perfectly. "Welcoming." I literally learned how to properly use a compressor using MCompressor because the person who was teaching me thought the display was good for showing what the compressor was doing (and it is). So I had been using it for years when one day I clicked on a button and an interface popped open and I learned that in addition to all the other stuff it can do, like letting you create a totally custom curve, it has a built-in EQ so that you can filter what the detector hears. Whoa. And that's been my experience with their products, I use them every day, but always with the feeling that there are features under the hood that I don't know about. I actually like to read manuals to find out what the software can do, but Vojtech takes the same approach to documentation that he does to the software, where most of the manuals' text is shared between products. There are pages and pages on the preset management system, the A-B auditioning system, etc. but less on what is specific to the plug-in. And there is usually either nothing or next to nothing about how to apply the effect to program material. Especially in cases where the plug-in does something specialized and out-of-the-ordinary, like MAutoDynamicEQ, the feature set is incredibly deep, but I'm not making the use of it that I could be due to lack of documentation. Don't get me wrong, I'm getting more than my money's worth, but I know I could be working some magic with that thing if I knew how to apply it better. And not just that specific dynamic equalizer, but maybe someone's never owned any dynamic EQ before. It's not that common a plug-in after all. How about a little information on what they do and why? Yeah, YouTube videos, but that only goes so far. My one business suggestion for Vojtech would be to raise the price of every plug-in by $5 and use the proceeds to hire Chandler to expand the manuals, and include application information.?

It is excellent, and the one I use most, but if you dig deeply into Meldaproduction's MEqualizer, it does just about everything that the QuadCurve EQ does, plus way more, if you start digging into the deep features. Try the harmonics for one thing, and it also throws in this really great sounding saturation knob, if you choose to access it. It has the scaleable GUI, your choice of skins, color schemes, bunches of sonogram and analyzer options, mid-side, more stuff than I can list. For me, the PC QuadCurve is my everyday workhorse, but when I really need to go to work on something, it's MEqualizer (or one of my paid plug-ins). I'd have no problem being given nothing but what comes with CbB and putting together a decent mix. It would be more work, and it might not pop and tickle as much as if I had my favorites to work with, but I could get it done in style. Everything else just makes it faster and more fun, and in some cases lets me work magic with challenging material like phone recordings.

The bundles I listed have great compressors, but they aren't long on "character" and "vintage mojo." If you want to add some coloration and character to your compression, Klanghelm offers that in heaping helpings. And they have some freeware loss leaders to get you interested. The MJUCjr. is a variable mu compressor that emulates a "tube" compressor. The DC1A is billed as an "effortless character comp." It has two knobs, Input and Output, and two modes, Deep and Relaxed. Character for days. The IVGI is a saturation/distortion plug-in, I believe it emulates the kind of distortion you can get from overdriving an old console input.

The compressors emulate specific classic hardware units, and as far as I'm concerned, they hold their own with other emulations I've tried. You can spend more money and what it will get you is usually either more faithful emulation of the old hardware's quirks and coloration, or more versatility as far as added controls, or both. Vice One, if I remember correctly, doesn't try to specifically emulate any of the compressors that the ProChannel ones do, so it's hard to say. As far as using resources, the ProChannel modules seem to be light by comparison with the fancy 3rd-party ones. Whether you can do well without other compressors, in my opinion, yes, but that would include the fact that you also have the Sonitus fx compressor at your disposal. There are also many, many excellent 3rd party freeware options if you want coloration and "mojo." Keep an eye on the "Favorite Freeware" thread. Also, BandLab have other, unreleased ProChannel modules from Sonar Platinum, and we can hope that someday they include them in CbB.