Starship Krupa

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!

One of the things that can drive me nuts about contests like the first one is that the prize for it is the Abbey Road Collection, which is a great bundle of plug-ins for someone mixing projects that use live instruments and samples and loops thereof. The "hello, 1999 called and wants its glowsticks back" Trance project you're supposed to add your personal touch to is not the kind of music that the Abbey Road Collection could really do justice to, at least the 12 seconds or so that I could stand to listen to (I don't care for Trance). Is it? Seems to me that an EDM producer or mixing engineer would much rather have something (anything) from iZotope.

When talking about music, how else do you describe it? "Yeah, cool, it kind of reminds me of people skateboarding next to a yacht harbor on a cloudy day. And then a fishing boat comes by and the captain waves to the skaters."

You're running UAD plug-ins on Sonar 8.5 when you could be running them on Cakewalk by BandLab at no cost or risk to update? I'd at least give it a try. I would not be surprised people on the Cakewalk by BandLab forum don't know anything about dotted lines around plug-in names in Sonar 8.5. That program was discontinued almost 9 years ago. Who would remember such a thing even if they were running Sonar 8.5 back then? msmcleod's suggestion to search in the old forum is a great idea for Sonar 8.5 issues as it goes very far back. CJ Jacobson's suggestion to try CbB is an even better idea.?

I'm glad he mentioned the bit about setting it to 80, because 60 (which means 30mA per tube) is kinda cold. 40mA for a DeVille is right in what I consider to be the sweet spot for idle current, 60%. Eek, leaving the amp powered up while he's holding his screwdriver and turning and gesturing at the camera. In most cases, I try not to have both hands working in the amp at the same time, so if I were using this method, with Fender's test point, I'd use a lead with a clip on the test point so that I wouldn't have to hold the meter lead at the same time I've got that screwdriver in there. Most of the time when an amp is on my bench and it's hot, I have my left hand in my pocket. The shock that kills is the one that goes from hand to hand across the chest.

Oh, right! I hadn't thought of that, I might try it myself. So many ways to accomplish the same task. Cakewalk is a huge beast.

Hmm. You should have found and downloaded a file named WIN_ARIA_Player_v1.872.exe. I didn't notice any admonitions about having a paid license when I installed it, was that in a click-through that I didn't read? I can't even remember now how I found out that it was downloadable or why I thought it was free because it uses Plogue's GNU licensed code or something. Maybe on another forum.

That sounds pretty nasty. Seems like something's gotten scrambled in the way that CbB keeps track of plug-ins, and from what I've seen, that information, or some of it, may persist after an uninstall, so if you do try an uninstall/reinstall, make sure you do a completely clean one. There is probably a way to clear your system of all prior plug-in settings as well, although I don't know what it is. I'm sure that by this time you've contacted support. As others have pointed out, obviously this is not common, and things can get corrupted on individual systems. Where I get frustrated is with programs that leave settings behind that perpetuate the problems I was trying to cure by uninstalling them! Usually in the registry, but maybe in an .ini file in my user profile. Good luck whichever way you go, with a new DAW or whatever. Ableton Live is very different from Cakewalk. It's said that with the right theming you can get Reaper pretty close. Sometimes after a period of frustration and the damn thing just not working, the impulse is to never want to look at it again, but after all, it's free to jump back in any time you want, and I certainly recommend being reasonably proficient at more than one DAW. Very much so. BTW, I have to say that I'm pleased with the lack of aggressive defensiveness displayed by people responding.

They don't make it obvious any more. Once you've made your account, you need to go to their generic Downloads page and go to the Search tool, and do a search by date for Aria Player. That should bring up a link to the latest downloadable version, which I believe is from 2016. Download it, install it, and once you have it up and running, go into the plug-in's Settings and check for updates, both on the plug-in itself and the engine. If either of them are not the latest, Aria will automatically update itself, then you're good to go from there. Another favorite of mine that supports SF2's and SFZ's is TX16Wx, but I haven't tried those formats with it yet. It's a powerhouse sampler, though, and great to have in its own right. @msmcleod might want to look into it going forward. https://www.tx16wx.com/

The biggest issue that I had with Cakewalk-on-10 was Windows Defender's realtime scan doing things like scanning my plug-ins and sample libraries and audio tracks as they were streaming from the hard drive. All of which is entirely unnecessary and was causing a serious performance hit on my system. So I rolled up my sleeves and figured out how to configure Windows Defender on Windows 10 Home to behave as I want it to, which is to disable realtime scanning. I've heard that you can supposedly exclude certain folders from realtime scanning, but I don't even want the engine running. I got cantankerous about it. Defender scans my system in off hours, and of course doesn't find anything because I don't click on suspicious email attachments or download and install software from sites that look suspicious to me. My anti-virus protection for the last 30 years has been common sense backed up by on demand scans.

That's the idea, I'm sure, create good feelings. I'm kind of flabbergasted that they are doing this, given that we wound up paying what, less than $1.00 each for these sound collections? Swatches, their freebie, has grown in size now to what, almost 500 sounds? (they just added a bunch more to it) Thing is, I don't really want the advanced features, but I'd be happy to pay a bit more to be able to load the guitar packs into Strum Session. This is so above and beyond the call of customer service that I feel kind of weird asking them, even though as a business owner, it's something I would probably allow for the same reason. I will spread the word about their products every chance I get, you can be sure.

Nice. I'm an Aria Player fan when it comes to soundfonts. Be sure to go into the Settings every once in a while and let it check for updates to both the program and the engine. They're always working on the thing and keep it up-to-date with versions that are not available on the website.

Howdy. +1 on the value of YouTube tutorial videos. I've learned a lot from them. Do a search on how to mix whatever genre you're trying to learn to mix. You don't spell it out. Cinematic scores? Show tunes? Pop? The default seems to be synthetically-produced pitch-corrected R&B-tinged vocal pop, whereas my deal leans more toward indie rock recorded with instruments you have to stick microphones in front of, so I've had to sit through a lot of music that ain't exactly my thing and interpolate. Another +1 on remembering that mixing is an art and as such, every person's opinion is just that, including your buddy's, and razor's, Jim's and mine. As far as your questions about mixing orchestral instruments, personally I would not use ensemble samples in mono. I mean, they go to great pains to record these things in big concert halls with expensive equipment so that it will sound authentic in stereo. That goes for the solo instruments as well. There are some contexts when using orchestral samples where I might squash them down to mono, especially a solo instrument, if I wanted to use my own reverb on it to make it sound more like it's in the room with my band or something. Everyone's workflow is different. It sounds like your friend likes to bounce his MIDI virtual instruments to audio tracks early in the process, maybe to conserve memory. That's also known as "freezing." I don't use very many tracks, so I just let my MIDI tracks stay that way until mixdown. I like to mess around with the instrument sounds themselves. Noise between sounds is something that we audio recordists need to be concerned about. Mostly things that vocalists do. Breath noises, lip smacks. If you're doing virtual instruments (MIDI) only, it's not a thing. Panning will affect the balance of instruments in an ensemble sample. To hear the extent of it....listen! Put on your best set of studio cans and turn the pan pot and check the effect. Hope this helps, hope we see more of you.

Yeah, it's a pain, other audio programs I use that uses ASIO drivers have the ability to take what the PreSonus driver is giving it and translate that into "Input 1, Input 2, Input 3, Input 4, etc." I've never bothered to say anything to either party because on the PreSonus side, the drivers for my Firebox and Firepods will never be touched again, and on the Cakewalk side, I suspect "we list what the driver reports" would be the end of it, they have bigger fish to fry. You can at least rename them in the Devices list.

Wow, so sorry to hear this. I used to love those cheap breakfast buffets. And I, too clicked on this thinking it would have something to do with MAGIX taking the program over from Sony, and I was preparing to tell you that you just need to configure MAGIX Connect so that it stops showing you ads for their products that you already own. And, BTW, I just upgraded from 10 to 15 via the Humble Bundle and they really went to town on that code. Vegas, the tourist trap, might have jumped the shark, but Vegas, the video editing software, has acquired that feel of speed and stabillity that Cakewalk is sporting these days. And you don't even need to take "grandpa's special vitamins" to enjoy it!

I get ya, and I know it chafes when I toss out a good feature request and get offered a lame kluge in response that only proves the need for the feature. So I'll try not to be lame. Cakewalk is such a huge beast that as you no doubt know, "feature request" around here often turns into "it can actually already do that." So to answer your question, no, I would not find it useful. Here's why: I do what you do every time I finalize a mix and can tell you how I set it up. In addition to the Events and Alesae in my sig, I also have a pair of Boston A70's connected to the FP10 so I was psyched when I figured out that Cakewalk could do this. In Mixcraft, it's way clumsier. Change things just a little and I think referencing will become much simpler. 1. Create a stereo bus called Output 2. Route everything you would normally route to the HW out to Output 3. As you mix and want to reference on different speakers, route Output to whichever HW out you wish to use at the moment No more running around chasing down every track and bus that's routed to the HW output, everything will always be routed to Output (which you will rout to your HW out). It will be 2 mouse clicks away. This is what I do and it works a treat. From what I can see, we're essentially doing the same thing that Wavelab is doing, putting another software layer in right before the output. Again, if I have it wrong and this wouldn't work for you, let me know.

I've had to read your post several times to try to figure out how you might be switching speakers now and how you would like it to work more easily and quickly. With my setup, I have 4 sets of speakers, plus headphones also connected to the same output as 1+2. My interface has 10 outputs, and these outputs drive amplifier/speaker combinations, so I switch outputs at a software level, which is what I assume you want to do. What I usually do is go to the In/Out panel on my Master bus strip and switch to the appropriate output from there. That's two mouse clicks. Is that what you mean by "manually?" The change works on the fly, but there is sometimes a brief gap in playback. I adjust the levels in the Hardware Outs to compensate for any differences in the amplifier or speaker levels. Can you be more specific about how you're switching outputs now, and why it's not working for you? What you are trying to accomplish may already be doable with sends and/or buses like Mark suggests. Let's see....I just set up my Master bus with its Output set to "none" and a Send to each hardware output. All I have to do to switch to any output I want is enable the appropriate Send. Does that work for your use case?

That is a nice interface, but heavens, the Geneva.

(Don't want to be a party pooper, but shouldn't this be in the Coffee House or something?) I'm a pro amp tech and designer, and have lost count of the number of Hot Rod/Blues DeLuxe/Villes I've had through my shop in the past 15 years. Basically yes to most or all of what @Tubeydude says, but I find that with good jack hygiene, which on those amps means looping your cable through the handle on top to act as a strain relief, the nylon input jacks are just fine. At this age, and with those symptoms, the power tubes are suspect and should be swapped out by a tech who can properly set the bias for you. As for the power supply caps, in the mid 2000's, China's manufacturers had a massive problem that affected many brands of electrolytic capacitors, including Illinois, the supplier of the caps for Fender's tube amps (The common failure mode of LCD TV's and monitors where they come on for 10 seconds and then go back off is due to the cap cootie problem, and most of those TV's and monitors can be repaired with $10 worth of caps. Yes, all those 52" TV's that are sitting in landfills....). That's why Tubeydude has seen those poor Illinois fail after only a few years, and I'll bet they had that crud that looks like Gorilla Glue oozing out of them. Any current manufacture electrolytic capacitor, even generic, will likely last at least 30 years in that application. I see 40 year old caps in Fender Twins that are still holding on, and electrolytic caps, China crisis aside, are not in the category of things that used to be made better than they are now, quite the contrary. Materials science and manufacturing have advanced greatly in the past several decades. And yes, the power resistors for the 15V rails should be checked, as they do melt their own solder joints. I think they're 470 ohms standard and I started stocking 500 ohms to swap them out with, which cools things down and still provides plenty of current. I'm not familiar with the Rock Crusher, but aren't attenuators supposed to attenuate? I kid, but this one sounds like something's gone wrong and I hope the manufacturer of the device can set you up with a manual and expected behavior and all that. They do put a strain on your power tubes. Oh, and whatever you put in there, I suggest you make sure that whatever the labeling, it's made by Sovtek/EH/New Sensor. Sound great and last a long time. They make the tubes for Fender/Groove Tubes.