Starship Krupa

I guess the Marines have to make do with Navy Morale, or maybe they don't need extra morale, they're Marines, ooh-RAH! But yeah, the Air Force needs morale, the Coast Guard needs morale (when it's in your job description to bust homemade submarines full of cocaine you surely need theme music).

One of the things that I do to check whether the new build of Cakewalk is legit or not is I wait until the Bandlab Assistant has it downloaded and installed, then I click on the button that says "Open." After the program starts I observe it for a moment. What I'm watching for is whether it quits. If it does not quit, I can proceed with my work, secure in the knowledge that it is legit.

Couple of suggestions: I quieted NDIS.SYS way down on my Dell tower by rolling back to the previous network driver. It was spiking all over the place according to Latency Monitor, then I rolled it back one revision and poof! Also, for troubleshooting, Resource Monitor is a great tool for figuring out what is going on with your system. You can start it up by running Task Manager, then clicking on the Performance tab, then down at the bottom there will be a button for starting Resource Monitor. It will allow you to see what process is doing what to each disk and each file, what is using memory, network activity, etc. I used it to find out that Windows Defender was scanning my audio files as they were being streamed from the disk, which prompted me to figure out how to put a stop to that silliness.

I can't help but wonder why you are setting your projects at 192 and 96 and so forth when you are using older virtual instruments. 192 and 96 are usually for people capturing cymbals with expensive tube condenser microphones and the like. I never go higher than 88.2 myself, and since the strain on the storage space and other system resources is higher, I just go for 44.1 and I think it sounds fine. Of course, I may be half deaf and/or deluded. Anyway, here's a Swiss Army Knife workstation VSTi that will give you over 2500 sounds, including several acoustic basses that are better than the one in the TTS-1, IMO: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/64-Virtual-Instrument/1560-Xpand-2 Another option, one you should probably just jump on anyway because it's free, is Native Instruments' Komplete Start bundle: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-start/ Among the many, many sample instruments it comes with is a killer upright bass. I was just playing it and it's so much fun. If you play it really fast on your keyboard, it throws in finger noise and stuff. Lastly, if you have a Cakewalk Command Center account, you can download and install Home Studio for free, and it comes with Rapture Session, which, in addition to tons of amazing sounds, also has a great acoustic bass. Your options are many. Whatever you do, get Komplete Start and Rapture Session.

Oh, no kidding. I just took advantage of having a Gibson Cakewalk account to download and install Home Studio, which got me (among other things) Rapture Session, which in itself just blew me away with how great it sounds. And my understanding is that it's just a preset player.

Others have already pointed you to the existing exhaustive, endless discussions, which leaves me to bat cleanup. Shut up about it.

The workflow of Theme Editor is: 1. Open an existing theme, either Mercury or Tungsten. These are the "Light" and "Dark" ones that Cakewalk comes with. Mercury is the default theme that is hard coded into the program. If you have downloaded one of the many user-created themes that are available, you may also edit one of those. 2. Make whatever changes you want to the art, colors, etc. 3. Save your edited theme under a new name. "Rick's Mercury" or whatever. Since you don't mention that you did this, it might be where your efforts came to naught. Default location for themes is C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Themes. 4. Start Cakewalk, go into Preferences, change the theme to the one with your new name. Since you don't mention this either, it might also be where you went wrong. You can also go into Preferences/Colors and change some of the colors there, and those changes will override the choices made in whatever theme you are using. Welcome to the world of theme editing. It's a lot of fun. You can also try out some of the themes that other users have created, there are some really good ones.

Mariano, since so many people like v. 1.1, maybe you could leave it available, or even give your new one a different name? Really looking forward to seeing the new changes! You're a bright new star in the Cakewalk theme world.

Cakewalk plays better with plug-ins than any other host I've tried. Maybe give it a try in a DAW that's specifically coded to work in Windows rather than ones whose code has to be compatible with multiple operating systems.

Confirming that: 1. Installer asked which of VST2, 3, and AAX I wished to install and obeyed my choice of VST2 and 3 2. Plugin asked me for license key upon CbB startup and accepted it, no dongle required 3. Nice resizable UI, and I threw it on a drum machine track and it gave it a crunchy, slightly pumpy depth that wasn't there before, so entirely worth the registration and d/l IMO

A good thing for CbB users to do is head over to Boz Digital Labs and download Bark of Dog version 1, which still comes with the PC module.

Without that library you will not be able to play that funky musique. No, seriously, I think it has something to do with the mixer. No, really, seriously, ignore me, I think these are solid answers.

Indeed, my everyday dark and light themes are M-Spec and Boston Flowers. Having started on my own theme before M-Spec came out and made it unnecessary ?, I got a taste of how much work is involved, and I must thank the themesters for putting in the effort to make our Cakewalk experience so much more fun and pleasing to the eye.

The thing that baffles me is what happens between steps 1 and 4. ? Am I just kidding myself about the results of step 1? Is it performance anxiety?

For me, it's more like: 1. Practice keyboard part until I flow like Liberace sans candelabra 2. Arm MIDI track 3. Press R 4. Stagger around on keys like a sedated kitten for 3 or 4 takes until I realize it's not going to get any better 5. Quantize

Thanks. I was having fun, and in good humour, having found a way out. And thanks to Mark and Craig for the reminders of how many ways there are to hammer MIDI problems in this program.

That would have at least answered the (seemingly) eternal question "how are they supposed to make money from it?" Clever idea, though, if one were nefarious. Render time is otherwise time when the program is just kind of sitting there. If you strobed some subliminal ads for SSD's, RAM, Wave plug-ins....hey, waitaminit!

If this is a precursor to adding this feature to the program itself, I am so in, so to speak.

Not if you start your project with one of the many handy templates in the Start Screen. You do when starting a project completely blank, but that is what I call doing it the hard way. If you're new to Cakewalk, don't do it the hard way. Even (especially) if you're not, don't do it the hard way. As far as Buses being visible in the Track View, you have to click on the little arrow down at the bottom of the Track Headers.

When pointed at an SSD, Defraggler has an option called "Optimize." It will warn if you attempt a conventional defrag on an SSD that it won't do much good and will only wear it out faster. I don't know what "Optimize" does.

I'm overdue for updating my CM cornucopia. It really is astonishing what you get in the way of plug-ins for a $5 copy of that magazine. In itself it has enough editorial content that I can't realistically finish it in a month. I bought my copy years ago and some of the plugs are still in my go-to bin, a couple of them got me to shell out for the big brother version (most notably Unfiltered Audio G8), some of them turned me on to the manufacturers, and others aren't available anywhere else. It's a cheapskate's paradise, it is.

4) You're using obsolete, unsupported software Seriously, just go get Cakewalk. It's better in every way, and you can still use all of the premium stuff that came with your Platinum suite. Then go to www.piriform.com and download Speccy. Run it so that you can tell us how much RAM you have, whether your disk is an SSD, a 5700, 7200, what speed and generation that i5 is, etc. Just to let you know, I have a fairly ancient Dell Inspiron i5 notebook that ran Cakewalk like a champ with 4GB of RAM, since upgraded to 8GB. 7200RPM HD, soon to be upgraded to an SSD just because I can get one for $30. That Realtek chip is not "just a toy." It's rudimentary, but I've gotten some good work done with it. It's fine for mixing and monitoring, and if I connect a mixer to the input, I get decent captures. I have a Midiman UNO, and the system is a nice little porta-rig. It hasn't choked on anything that I've started on the main i7 system. Make sure to defrag. Piriform has a nice defragger, too, called Defraggler. Download the FREE versions of these utilities.

I've disabled AdBlock on this site just to see if I saw any of these ads, and nope, nada. Amusing given my diligence about disabling the Windows 10 firewall and Windows Defender realtime scanning.

Success! Thank you, Mark. It got all of them but one that has a duration of 0 and a velocity of 80. I can pick it off manually. For future encounters, I think it will do exactly what I want if it just looks for (== Note.Dur 0), but I have no reference for CAL of course, and I don't want to take chances with a script that deletes notes.? Does that pair of ampersands in "(&& (== Note.Vel 0) (== Note.Dur 0))" mean that both of those have to be true in order to execute "(delete)"? I notice in the other scripts that there are a lot of doubled-up ampersands, but I can't quite figure out what they do.

Thank you Mark. Now I just need to figure out what to do with that elegant bit of code! I've yet to run a CAL script. This will be my first. Good opportunity.