Starship Krupa

AirWindows is an odd company. Most of the plug-ins, while getting raving reviews from certain people, have no GUI's and many of them are stuck in 32-bit purgatory. The lack of GUI issue was something that gave me an excuse to delve into Cakewalk's FX Chain Preset feature, which allowed me to take the plug-in I wanted to use, De-Ess, and create my own GUI wrapper for it with a full complement of knobs and buttons. It was really quite useful and worked well and was something I don't know if I could have done in any other DAW. Since a de-esser is something that I want to be able to tweak repeatedly rather than poking numbers at, I would have passed on trying this plug-in otherwise.

Last time I downloaded it, it included a decent spectrum analyzer, a really sweet guitar amp sim, and some traditional modulation FX. I find their GUI's attractive.

The real question at this point, considering that you can get Cakewalk for free, is why, using a Sonar 7 program?

I think the line of reasoning is: 1. We only understand things a company does in terms of how they directly produce revenue, i.e. We make or do a thing, you pay us money for that thing 2. BandLab has never explained to us how Cakewalk will directly produce revenue for them 3. As it is a human trait to fear what we don't understand, we will invent a sinister way that Cakewalk could directly produce revenue for BandLab and try to convince Cakewalk users that BandLab intends to implement it 4. If we are successful, we will no longer fear, because with the reinforcement of the Cakewalk users' belief, we will understand BandLab's motives This has already become very tiresome for the people who are not burdened by #1, so I will try to relate a parallel example. Every year, Sony PlayStation pays millions of dollars to put their name on a college football game. The PlayStation Bowl! It's a big deal. Many people attend the game and watch it on TV. Does PlayStation make money from this? They must, in some way, they are not stupid, college football is not a charity. But the people who broadcast the PlayStation Bowl don't pay them money to do it, nor do the people who show up and sit in the stands and watch pay them. Nope, they actually lose money on the actual act of putting their name on the bowl game. However they sell enough of their consoles to more than make up for it as a result, because people who watch the game associate PlayStation with football. If they have watch parties, they may even buy a new PlayStation, and it will never be the competitor's console, because who would do that. Cakewalk can be BandLab's PlayStation Bowl, their Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, their Goodyear Blimp. Something cool with BandLab's name on it. To suddenly put code in it that would harvest user data and send it back to a server somewhere, which is activity easily detected, and DAW users are constantly monitoring their systems' CPU and network use to squeeze every last drop of performance, would be idiotic. It would generate so much bad publicity. The value of any user data that might be collected in such a fashion is rather overrated, I think. BandLab has already had my email address for a year and a half and what have they done with it? Nothing. Zero, zip, nada, not even sent me mail themselves. That's how interested they are in using our precious user data. Does BandLab or any person or company associated with them have any history of involvement with any activity like that? Of course not. The owner is the son of a wealthy and successful family who is building his own business with the help of his family's wisdom and capital and doesn't need to pull stupid scams. Cakewalk is a freebie that has synergy with BandLab's other products. That's about it. They're not going to wait until a whole bunch of people have a lot of projects they're working on and then start charging for it, and they're not going to turn it into spyware.

I think that a person can put together an excellent system entirely with freeware, and CbB is of course an excellent foundation. I hope this thread will be a "virtual sticky," that is, I expect it will be bumped often enough to stay near the top. I'm going to start listing favorite tried-and-true free plug-ins and links to where to download them. They are all ones that I have used extensively with Cakewalk, so they are safe to use in that environment. My recommendations will be only for 64-bit VST's. This thread is intended to be of assistance to our fellow users, especially new ones, in finding good plug-ins to augment the collection that comes with Cakewalk. I'll start with the bundles that I think every DAW user should download straightaway, whether they're on a budget or otherwise. First is the Meldaproduction Free Bundle. This bundle of 34 plug-ins has been described as the best value in the plug-in world, and I agree wholeheartedly. The Compressor and EQ surpass most of the payware competition and wind up on most of my projects to this day, 5 years since I first downloaded the bundle. Download it, spend an evening trying out all of the FX on some material and be amazed at what Meldaproduction is letting us use for free. As a promo, it sure worked on me, I've paid to upgrade the Free Bundle and also bought licenses for other Melda plug-ins. There are utilities in here like signal and noise generators and analyzers in addition to the excellent sound processors. If you only get one of these, make it this one. Kilohearts Essentials. Another 30+ pro-quality FX for free. Low on resources and sound great. Rock solid in Cakewalk and Sonar. Just about every basic bread-and-butter effect you can name (compressor, chorus, phaser, delay, filter, limiter and the like) and a bunch of more exotic ones like my favorite basic pitch shifter, tape stop, slow down, reverser, vocal ensemble, bit crusher, and more. Too many goodies to remember them all. Just two downloads, MeldaProduction and Kilohearts, and you're have over 70 effects from two of the most respected companies in the plug-in business. At this point, you'd have more than everything you need to stop and get back to making music, but there are so many more great bundles and individual FX to try, so let's continue.... The ReaPlugs from Cockos, makers of REAPER. Six highly-configurable, very powerful effects, a compressor, multi-band compressor, EQ, delay, gate, and FFT dynamics processor, plus a couple more utilities. It may not sound so exciting, but these are very versatile, and very configurable, much like REAPER, the DAW that is their main product. The EQ and MB compressor allow as many bands as you want, the delay as many taps as you want, etc. Next is Voxengo's Assortment of goodies. I mostly stick with SPAN, the spectrum analyzer, and MSED, their mid-side utility, but Boogex, their amp simulator, and Stereo Touch, their stereoizer, are both excellent at what they do. I find the standard UI theme colors to be challenging on my eyes, so I tone them down in the settings. Blue Cat's Freeware Pack includes a good spectrum analyzer, a really nice guitar amp sim, and a good handful of modulation FX. Very attractive GUI's. The Dead Duck Free Effects Bundle has 25 essential no-frills FX, nothing fancy, just functional and easy on the eyes. Compressor, Gate, EQ, Phaser, Flanger, Chorus, Bit Crusher, Expander, Channel Strip, they're all there. I've tried them and they work. Nothing fancy about the GUI's, they're nice and attractive, no fake brushed aluminum. As for the sound, no attempts here to inject "mojo" or "vintage warmth" or anything, they do what they say they do. If you download and install everything you can get from those five sites, you'll have in the neighborhood of 100 new plug-ins to try out. Each of them, even Dead Duck, has unique effects and utilities that might wind up being your favorite thing or just handy to have in your plug-in bin in case you need to do a bit of attenuating or boosting or analyzing or bit crushing or whatever. I'll be back with many more, and of course, I hope that others will jump in with great suggestions. These are just what I consider the freebie essentials, the Cheapskate's Choice. And sure, we have another thread for VSTi's.

For those doing this kind of spelunking, there's also the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3 folder to take a peek in to be surprised at what you might find if you think that you haven't been installing 32-bit versions of your plug-ins.

I'm not usually a hawk, but in this case, I would rather that they had escalated straight to the computer outage and skipped the preliminary skirmishes with the submarine people killing each other.

Hmm, maybe #3 means "why do they always happen right before I do a #2?"

Thanks for bringing it up, abacab. Gee, since I always tell installers not to install AAX plug-ins, I naively thought that I didn't have any installed! Turns out that's not any more reasonable than expecting not to find any newly-installed 32-bit plug-ins on my system. I clean those out about monthly. My haul of freed-up SSD space was 1.5G

I loved the background music for Myst. It was almost as important and beautiful as the graphics.

Well the licensing's changed since you hung around, but the devs have remained and they've turned around. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Little-known fact: Californians have over 100 words for "earthquake."

I went in there and said "hey, 1978 called, it wants its attitude back!"

In Lou of that, they had to play by ear instead and ended up being Out O'Tune. Fortunately, one of them, whose straight job was as a radiologist in a hospital, was nabbed when a woman we had both dated, a police detective, came in for a mammogram. Yes, they were caught when they started to Isotope Our Ex.

LAME

Of course I wasn't, I knew you weren't.❤️? Please excuse the ranting of a NAIVE Californian. ? We get so easily triggered, y'know, oh my GAWD, my therapist says I need to set like, boundaries, y'know? And I'm like, that's so not easy for me, because y'know, my family of origin, nobody ever had any at all. So I've had to like, learn to make amends when I encroach on someone else's, y'know, and that so doesn't come naturally, my parents were too busy trying to catch the perfect wave or riding their mountain bikes to like, teach us anything about boundaries or making amends. ?

Well, although I am a native Californian, I don't care for such sentiments. The belief/attitude that people who colonized or inhabited a place first have greater claim to it than those who arrived later or whose ancestors arrived later than other people's ancestors has done so much horrible damage to humanity in the past that I recoil from it. I think it's poison, and that bumper sticker is rude and unfriendly. Notice I "reveal" the actual numbers behind the "secret" when I make that joke. This is so that our beloved state can continue to attract people who are good at math, probability, and statistics. Anyone who is smart enough to realize that it's highly unlikely that they will be harmed by an earthquake will be welcomed by me. So will anyone else for that matter. Once they "survive" a couple of quakes and notice that nobody else is freaking out they will calm down like the rest of their fellow Californians. ? The first state that I noticed making a big deal about the "native" thing was Colorado, during the '80's (surprise). My mom moved there around '81 or so and I noticed all these bumper stickers that had the green and white motif and mountain outline of the Colorado license plate, and read "NATIVE." Then I started to see other ones in the same style. The first one was "ALIEN," which I thought was a good start, then there were a variety of obligatory geek ones like "HOBBIT," "JEDI," and "VULCAN," and then "WHO CARES?" which became my favorite. Then. Finally. I saw the winning entry, the one I had been thinking of myself, the one I would actually put on my own bumper, which was "NAIVE."

My bad, 25 years. I was thinking Loma Prieta and forgot about Northridge 5 years later. Sorry to hear about your friends. That's awful. That style of apartment building is (or was) common around SoCal when I was a kid, I can't tell you how many school friends lived in them. Not seen as much up here, but they exist. 3 stories with a 2-story overhang up on steel pipes over a carport. Sturdy as long as the force is all straight down, but I guess crap if it starts moving side to side. Nothing to stop the 2-story section from just falling off the pipe poles. Was there ever a good retrofit designed to prevent that or do they just not allow architects to build them?

No, I got exactly what you were trying to do! That came across, and it is a clever idea and works for the piece. I really liked the idea. Just if you try it next time, I wanted to suggest taking more care to put the "narrator" or lead vocal voice in a similar sonic landscape as everything else. It's why mentioned the bit about being able to making individual elements move to the front. You can still do what you were trying to do while making your voice sound as if it's in that lush magic mystical space. Maybe I'm not describing what I mean well enough. With a rock band or a folk ensemble or an orchestra it's easier, because their music also exists outside the studio and we can say the band should sound like they're in the same room (or coffee house or concert hall) playing even though we're recording them an instrument or section at a time in a studio or even more than one studio. But we do tricks to make it sound like the singer, drummer, guitarist, bassist, and keyboard player were all there in one room playing at the same time. This is even more so for people like me who are one man indie rock bands. I have to make it sound like I am 4 or 5 people all plugged in and mic'd up on an idealized stage in an idealized fantasy nightclub, and not call attention to the fact that every single note, drum hit, word sung, everything on the recording is all me overdubbed. In the case of ambient/EDM/electronica, it goes off script, but since humans live in a reverberant world, humans still want to hear reverberations and ambiance in our recordings, and our ears still like it when we hear reverb even as an exaggerated effect. As a matter of fact, our ears are so good at it, because they have to be in order for us to survive, that we are also good at detecting when reverberant spaces, even artificial ones, aren't quite "right." So as we find out, even completely synthesized music wants all of its sonic elements to sit in a comfortable sonic space. They're still instruments at the end of the day. You ever go into a dorm room or new home before your family or friends move in? They just sound and feel too "live" and it maybe feels a little uncomfortable? There are too many surfaces causing too many reflections to hit your ears at slightly different times because there's no furniture and carpeting in the place to deaden it. It actually drives me kinda nuts. I feel on edge in places with nothing up on the walls. The same thing can happen with a mix if you put on competing plug-ins, where one has its reflections set to one set of time constants and others have theirs set to others. They clash, and the sense of a coherent space is lost. Of course, to the extent that this is a rule, it can be deliberately broken to interesting effect. Benny Benassi likes to make his "Macintosh System voices" dry so that they really pop out, and it works. In the case of your piece, maybe you used a different plug-in, different settings, or just too little reverb or delay for my taste, but that's just my taste, and it's also one sonic element on a great sounding track. I change my mind all over the place with my mixes. Anyway, I did want to get across my idea of "painting a picture," where I close my eyes and I "see" your musical tracks kind of going out in all directions with a certain soft gauzy texture, and any elements that come to the forefront should pop to the forefront, but they should still have that same soft texture. I listen to mixes with my eyes closed a lot to "see" what pictures come to mind, if it "looks" coherent. I see them with my mind's eye as well as listen with my ears. Try it?

I'll reveal a Californian secret: we play up the earthquake thing because it's one of the few things that keeps people from the rest of the country from flocking here and making the housing crisis even more unbearable. If you look at the statistics for injury, death, and property damage, ice storms, tornadoes, floods and just plain nasty weather are WAY more destructive, by an insane factor. In the past three decades in California earthquakes have killed exactly one person, who died of a heart attack because they were afraid of earthquakes. But all it takes is a little shake that knocks a picture off the wall and relatives from the East Coast (where dozens die each Winter in ice storms and car accidents caused by bad weather) phone up wanting to know if we're okay, despite the news reports saying that there were no injuries. We actually welcome these smaller tremors because they mean the plates are releasing energy. The longer we go without an earthquake, the more of our gold records and Oscar Awards fall on the floor when the next one finally happens. Yep, huge cracks opening up and swallowing cars all over the place! It's horrible! Oh, the humanity! ?

So sorry to hear this. Glad to hear that she passed peacefully. Most sincere and heartfelt condolences. I hope that music and community will be a comfort to you in the coming months.

Lovely indeed. I really like the guitar. This is my first commentary in the Songs subforum, so I don't know how welcome mix suggestions are. If they are not welcome, I apologize. If they are, I concur with the earlier comment about the ambience processing on your lead vocal. The music and backing vocals and the higher vocal that comes in later all sound like they exist in the same ambient mystical "space," but your voice doesn't quite, if you get what I mean. On my own mixes, I either use a reverb send or use similar settings on the individual track reverbs so that it all sounds like it's in the same space, glued together. I can still make individual elements come to the front by varying the amount of reverb or using compression, but they sound like they are in the same space.

I got Gatey Watey on the introductory free deal and it's been on every kick and snare track since then. Its competition in my plug-in collection is the Unfiltered Audio G8, which is quite a gate, and there's never a contest. It makes it so easy to get hi hat out of a snare track and snare out of a kick track that it feels like cheating.

Have you gone into Preferences/VST Settings and added the path to your plug-ins folder to the VST scan paths? There should also always be one for c:\program files\common files\vst3

The licensing model of plug-ins or libraries has no bearing on whether Cakewalk will freeze or crash. Cakewalk has no way of knowing how they are licensed, and as we know, Cakewalk itself is licensed via a free subscription. Freezes and crashes from plug-ins come from buggy (or just incompatible) code, and they exist in both free and pay licensed plug-ins. As a consumer, one has to take care whenever using anything, check forums to see if other people have had trouble with the thing, take advantage of free trials and demos, etc. While it's true that free plug-ins are more likely to be coded by one person working alone in their studio, that may also be true of ones we have to pay for as well. A couple of my favorite and highly respected plug-in houses are one-man coders (Boz, Melda), and I have never heard of anyone having trouble with their software (and both of them give away free plug-ins!). I love my Sonivox Orchestral Companions, but they have a pretty nasty incompatibility with a number of DAW's including Mixcraft, which was my primary before Cakewalk. Also FL Studio, I think, and maybe Samplitude. If you put your playback into loop mode, after the first iteration, playback goes into this staccato mode, which made mixing a real pain in the tuchus. Fortunately the devs at Acoustica did a workaround, and double fortunately, the bug doesn't manifest in Cakewalk. Pardon my soapbox, but I like to counter what I see as unwarranted fear, uncertainty and doubt about free licensed software. There was a TON of it in the old Cakewalk forum when BandLab came to the rescue. It can be as good or as buggy as anything else. In either case, check the reputation and be careful. Caveat emptor for any software. As Mark said, Kontakt libraries can include all kinds of things in addition to just the samples, and Trumpette may have boogered up the scripting. And yes, if you're into stuff like Kontakt, you should probably spring for more RAM. I'm at 8G myself and long overdue. I'm tired of tiptoeing around with system resources. Your post here is a good reminder!