Starship Krupa

In my limited experience Waves are pretty good about keeping you up to date with the newest patches; and if you choose to update your licenses to the latest (v10) they're also pretty cheap on the upgrade path.

"Registered Wikipedia editor." It's kind of like being a registered sax offender. ? Hey, you or anyone else could add on to the article, I'm probably one of the least knowledgeable people on here to be doing it. You're a good writer, so I encourage you to take a swipe. I see a @Jim Roseberry byline, maybe he could do a spot of Wikipedia editing in the interest of historical accuracy. While you're at it, put in a paragraph or two in the articles for Los Angeles talking about your role (I'm not worthy!). Seriously, X fans would be fascinated. Not too long ago I added a link to "Gaslighting" in the See Also section of the entry on Steve Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field" in front of a friend of mine and he was astonished that I could change Wikipedia just like that. ? He's a vintage drum enthusiast, along with having other interests, and would make a good Wikipedia editor himself. I told him, just click on the word "edit," and boom, you're editing Wikipedia. You don't even have to register, but it has its benefits. It's easier to make changes "stick" if you have a history of making changes that have been reviewed and have been allowed to stand in the past, so that the people who do the reviewing know that you're not prone to vandalism. My rep is solid, so my edits don't get flagged for immediate review. I clean up vandalism and fix other people's spelling and grammatical errors, so I'm a "good guy."

Oh, it wasn't all that. What you see there is pretty much how it was before the overexcited editors got to it. If you are a registered Wikipedia editor you can go back and see what the edits were and who did them, so I just sort of regressed it. There's an issue with Wikipedia in that it likes references in the form of other publications, so there would ideally be an interview to refer to. I mean, anyone can theoretically write anything they wish, which has resulted in problems with articles on controversial topics such as biographies of politicians and other public figures, but outside citations are preferred. Oddly enough, at one point at least it was apparently considered taboo for someone to edit a page about themselves, so I guess if Mike Nesmith goes into the studio to do some remastering of the First National Band records, he should have one of his fans add that to his Wikipedia page if he wants it on there. On behalf of CbB, I have been going around to the different pages that list DAW's and substituting Cakewalk by BandLab for SONAR where appropriate, or adding it where it's been missing from the lists, and also updating things like file formats that it can handle (which was way out of date) and support for ARA2. Our favorite DAW is now looking more favorable in the comparison tables on Wikipedia. Still, there's no main page for Cakewalk by BandLab. I'm looking forward to outlining the "free subscription" licensing model. ?

I just downloaded and messed about with Visual Mixer and Relay and I haven't tried them on anything else, but for mixing backing vocals, I think I am always going to use this. It's one of those "how could someone not have come out with such a thing 10 years earlier?" things, and I know iZotope has had it around for a while. This is a great promo. The moment my budget increased for plug-ins would be the moment I would plunk down the money for the full iZotope enchilda special (and maybe a Melda bundle). I think their plug-ins sound great, and their UI's are my favorite in the business. As far as the suites go, their presets and wizards have provided me with good benchmarks and starting off points. They're maybe not what I stay with by the time the mix is finished, but they're so nice for throwing up a rough mix after a few hours of tracking.

The article is nice enough as far as being favorable in tone, but as far as grammar errors and content, it reads as if it were written by a high school sophomore, right down to the first 25% of it being lifted almost word-for-word from Wikipedia articles. I know that because I've been going through the Wikipedia articles on Cakewalk, Cakewalk Inc. and SONAR the past couple of months and doing my best to clean up some big messes. They're still ugly, but you should have seen them before I got there. Out of order timelines, random facts stuck in willy-nilly, not to mention plain falsehoods. The most tragic was that someone had trashed the page for the original Cakewalk sequencer by conflating it with Cakewalk by BandLab. The page was originally pretty good compared to the other pages associated with Cakewalk, like the clustercuss that was and is the page for SONAR, but someone had gone in and apparently without reading the page first had deleted large chunks and edited it to indicate that BandLab had bought it and was now developing it. It was as if they were not familiar with SONAR or had not bothered to search for the page on SONAR that already had the information. CbB deserves its own Wikipedia entry, but I'm too busy to start one myself. The entry on SONAR is not a useful starting point. It's an example of how not to write a Wikipedia article about software, IMO.

I know, right? ?They've been around as long as there's been online communication, though (or maybe as long as there has been mass communication, in the form of letters to the editor). The "tell" is usually the sweeping generalizations (often about other people's opinions and behavior, along the lines of "that's why the rest of the industry has been abandoning platform X in droves!") on topics where it's impossible for anyone to show evidence for or contrary. One thing I can say is that I've never met anyone in person who will admit to being one, so either they don't go out and interact with people IRL very much or they lie about doing it! I once got rid of a very nasty troll by counseling all the regulars on a BBS to start answering all of its outrageous statements with a brief "no it's not" or "that's not true" and leaving it at that. Registration on the BBS was open, so you couldn't kill filter it, and it was beyond the will power of any sane and rational person to merely not answer it, so I came up with that solution and it got rid of the problem in less than a week. I knew the battle had turned when, frustrated, it tried using it against other people a few times, then it simply crawled back under whatever slimy rock it originated from.

I was going to post this, except that's not what Larry's asking. That's the answer to "how do you master a song?" ? Actually, my full answer to that is "I use the 'heartbreak method,' which is to spend years reading books, forums, studying videos, practicing, auditioning plug-ins, then get an Ozone Elements 8 license free when I buy Vacuum Pro, then try a few presets and realize that I'd be lying if I said it doesn't do a great job right out of the box. And that's the 'lite' version!" Larry wants to know how you master an album, as in a collection of songs so that they're all listenable together no matter how different they might sound individually. Like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Nevermind or Rumours or Siamese Dream or Disintegration or any number of great rock or pop albums that have harder and softer songs together but still sound coherent. Which is an excellent question.

It's the largest city in Scotland, for heaven's sake. I, too have heard the people are great. They'll do things like make your nanoKONTROL2 work with Cakewalk and ask naught in return. I must wonder how someone who works in an airport, not just any airport, but the largest airport in the United Kingdom, which Scotland is a part of, not know where Glasgow is. To me, being that unprepared would be a bad dream : "I'm at the counter at Heathrow, and people are asking me basic things, like how to get to Cardiff, or to Dover to pick up the Channel Tunnel train, and I don't know how to answer any of them. Then I wake up with my pulse elevated." I've always pronounced the name of the city "GLASZ-goh," which I hope is correct.

50 Volts! Och, McLeod, d'ye live up 'n the Orkneys?

You'll have better luck asking on the Meldaproduction forum. I wasn't even aware that MEqualizer had this function and I have been using it on every project for the past 3 years. Meldaproduction products are full of surprises. Have you upgraded your free bundle? A couple of times a year Vojtech has a half price sale on everything, and that includes the upgrade on the Free Bundle, which I took advantage of. Well worth it if you haven't done it.

It doesn't help that Cakewalk's documentation is very thorough about describing the many options for audio export while being careful not to explain or recommend any specific option (at least that I could find). This is unfortunately common among DAW's, among metering plug-ins, and even, sadly, among articles and videos about level and loudness. I have found them all strangely coy when it comes to specific instructions. By that I mean like where you actually insert the metering plug-in, which might seem obvious, but it's not for someone new to all this. If you don't know where to put it, it's like getting a Roku Box without knowing that you are supposed to connect it to the Internet, but if Roku Boxes also didn't pop up error messages saying that they weren't connected to the Internet and also without knowing that you're supposed to be able to watch Amazon Prime and Netflix and Kanopy and Hulu and Tubi and all this other stuff on them. I would expect there to be something like "examine your DAW's signal flow chart to find the last point you can insert the loudness metering plug-in before monitoring and rendering and do no level adjustments past that point before rendering" but nope, they just expect people to come from the womb knowing that. In the DAW world, the documentation usually says "you can render from here, there, and everywhere, isn't it wonderful how versatile it all is?" When it would be helpful to at least be told that most of the time you're going to want to choose this and this and this option. And if you find that your rendered file's level is too low, increase it on this or that fader. The simplest stuff is not always painfully obvious to first-timers and because it's considered the simplest stuff it won't be documented as well. When I was starting out with DAW's I read a couple of articles and watched a few videos about this stuff and studied my DAW's documentation and at the end of all that I knew that Oasis had ruined radio by using a brickwall limiter and that it was up to all of us to use the LUFs standard to fix things. I learned that we could use metering plug-ins on our DAW's to do it, also standalone programs like one by my old company, Orban. I also knew that there were a bunch of different LUFs numbers that different streaming and digital music services used as their standards. What I did not learn from any of my reading or video watching was where to put the plug-in, which of the numbers I should be shooting for, how Level relates to Loudness, and what to do if my LUFs were too big or too small. And that seems weird to me, that after all that effort to figure it out, I'd still be so in the dark, when all those things are not only quite important, but also easily explained (except for the loudness/levels thing, which I still haven't sorted out).

That's a thing, back in the VST2 days it seemed like the hosts mostly knew what to do with the .fxp and .fxb files that were installed with the plug-ins. I'd go to the host's preset menu and the factory presets would already be in there. With VST3's, that's not the case.

Who cares about Sonar X3? Cakewalk by BandLab is better.

Cakewalk for Windows 1.0? Whoa. Yeah, I always click the little double arrow in the Track Header to minimize the track image when I'm working in the Lanes. I trust that you do that? I find it helps. It would be nice if that would happen automatically when the Expand Lanes button is pressed. I have messed myself up by performing operations on the Track Image that I meant to perform on a Take Lane, and that's its own Special Cakewalk Horror. A feature that I haven't submitted because I'm 99% sure it's already been submitted is horizontal Zoom to Selection, like Audacity has. Audacity has some convenient features that I pine for in other audio programs. The way that their selections just automatically become loop points and vice versa, and the way that you can adjust the selection points by dragging them, man, do I ever wish that all of my audio programs had that. When I first got Mixcraft I kept dialing these perfect drum loops using their loop markers before remembering that it was a dead end, there was no direct way to convert a loop selection to a crop selection or any other kind of selection.

Hey, John, good to see you. I always enjoyed the discussions that resulted from your questions at TOP. I heartily second what @slartabartfast, @bitflipper and @marled have said, especially regarding the importance of recording your virtual instruments as "dry" as their controls will allow and adding reverb in Cakewalk with the reverb plug-in of your choice. Also, it is not down to sample rate or the price of your virtual instruments. I'll share a personal tip with you. When I got back into home recording in a big way half a dozen years ago, I was at first knocked flat by all the choices and how much was available, how you can slap 12 plug-ins on each track if you want, etc. Then I brushed up on my mixing theory and practice and settled down. The way I see it is with a mix I'm painting a picture or creating a diorama, and reverb is the room the diorama sits in. So I rarely put a reverb plug-in on an individual track. I do it like the engineers did 50 years ago when they had "echo chambers" or a single plate or spring and put my favorite reverb plug-in (at the moment Waves TrueVerb, there, I get a bingo point, but I also like the freeware OrilRiver) on a bus and use sends so that everything that gets reverb goes to that one Reverb bus. This has the effect of making everything sound as if it's happening in one sonic space. The point of reverb (unless it's being used as an obvious effect) is to make sounds seem as if they are in natural acoustic spaces, and I want everything to sound as if it's in the same acoustic space. In the case of your piano ballad, which, BTW, I liked the song and the second mix, I especially wanted it to sound like your voice and your piano were in the same virtual room. So that if I closed my eyes, I could "see" you singing and playing. Because your voice is the lead instrument, and you are doing a good job of keeping it in front, and then your piano is your main backing instrument, and we're used to seeing singer pianists. The rest of the band can then be arranged around behind you, sonically, but singing John and his piano should stay up front. Like Elton or Billy when the band comes in, they stay up front and center. When I mix, I close my eyes from time to time to "see" what the "band" (who are all me overdubbed) "look like" in the mix. I usually try to spread the drummer out, then the bass player a little to the right, keys to the left a bit, and my lead vocal and one guitar in the center and relatively dry to provide a focal point of "Erik singing and playing guitar." Reverb is, to me, essential, but it can also fill up the acoustic space like nothing else. One rule of thumb I have is that if I can hear the reverb, there may be too much of it. Not always true, but if I hear it, I will back off the sends and see if the mix sounds better. After all, in real life how often do we actually consciously perceive room reverb vs. just feeling it? It's good to be careful with putting reverb plug-ins on individual tracks because it can make mix elements sound like they are happening in different acoustic spaces. It's not a no-no, it's just good to be careful that it doesn't mess with the image. Usually the reverb that comes built in to virtual instruments doesn't sound as natural as an external dedicated plug-in either, so I look for a way to mute it as soon as I can. Similar with big wide patches on synths. They sound great solo'd, but eat up too much room in a mix. My friend and local studio owner and sometime client Myles Boisen has written a couple of good articles on this topic that I will leave you with: https://www.emusician.com/how-to/space-is-the-place-part-1 https://www.emusician.com/how-to/space-is-the-place-part-2

Yeah, I know about that Silverlight. "Skylight" is the name for the system with all the collapsible and docking windows, then. I just think of it as "Cakewalk." ? And Keni must be a Sonar old, old timer. I don't know anything about Sonar's layers, but lanes systems seem to be the DAW standard for compositing and I am glad that Cakewalk has them rather than something else. It made it way easier to transition, and I know that my Pro Tools user friend who sat down cold in front of Cakewalk and knocked out a song in 2 days was helped by the fact that Cakewalk uses a lanes system for comping. I feel your pain on the transition, though. There have been some nasty bugs addressed in the Take Lanes system, according to the release notes, which means that it must have been rough on first release. There's still one that messes my clip lengths up when loop recording multiple audio tracks. I have to drag the ends out on a couple of them if I stop the recording before the end of the loop. It may have put people off from the lanes system in general. Also, Speed Comping is really confusing at first, with its automatic muting and all that. It took me a long time to sort it out before I got hold of a copy of the old Ref. Guide. I can see where it can be quick and handy for some workflows, but I still haven't incorporated it yet and I'd like to be able to turn off some of its features. It's too easy to get into trouble with it, especially if I have clips grouped. As I've seen people gripe about "take lanes" I've wondered how much of what they really dislike is Take Lanes as such and how much of it is the other features (some buggy) that came with take lanes. For instance, it drives me batsnot that my takes get cut up into clips where I don't want them to. I finally learned how to "heal" them with the comping tool, but why? I'm still not 100% sure what's expected behavior there. The Ref. Guide doesn't mention it.

I'm going to resist Googling this one....I remember the box you're talking about, think it was maybe made by Sequential Circuits? It's stuck in my memory with the Drumtrax and the SixTrak. Same era.

I didn't think that was possible. Well, I'm glad that it brought you back to square one at least. Now I hope you install BA and just let it do its thing. It'll be fiiiine, don't worry. And the thing is, Cakewalk is supported, so if you run into any snags, you can put in a ticket with an actual support staff who will help you out. You don't have to rely on forum flunkies like me for advice. I don't know what your focus is in using Sonar, but the devs, in addition to doing some good work with tuning for speed and stability, added ARA2 support in the latest build of Cakewalk, so if you're doing anything with Melodyne, it will add a lot of functionality to that. Get your blob on.

If you go to the Finale/Garritan/MakeMusic website and create an account, you can also download the Aria player. Thanks for the tip on Grace Sampler, @Kurre. I'm a TX16Wx fan, but it may be good to have a simpler sampler on hand.

My understanding is that if you let CbB install with its default settings, and you have a Sonar installation that was done with default settings, nothing in your existing Sonar installation will be overwritten. I don't speak from personal experience, just reading many, many accounts from forum members on the subject. The bundled MIDI and DXi plug-ins in particular are mostly or all ones that are common to both Sonar and CbB, for whatever that's worth. I started with CbB and since I've had it I have installed and uninstalled both a trial of Sonar Artist and a full version of Sonar Home Studio and all three programs coexisted happily.

This is a confusing post. What's silverlight? What switch from layers to lanes? Cakewalk by BandLab has never had anything called "layers" in all the time I've used it, and I've used it from the first week of its existence in April 2018. There are some things I don't like about the zooming logic, though, and I agree that the tracks wind up humongous when what I want to focus on is the clip or automation I'm working on. I can't figure out the logic of the horizontal zooming either, so I always wind up zooming in way to the left or right of where I want. I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just try to figure out which way CbB seems to want to go and try to "cheat" it in that direction so that I wind up somewhere near where I intended. It also drives me nuts that there's no command to zoom to the horizontal extent of a project without also filling the screen with the project vertically at the same time. So if I have a project with 2 tracks and execute the Fit Project to Screen command I wind up with these HUGE tracks.

I guess this is my chance to snag RX Elements for $29 only to have Pluginboutique run one of their deals where you get a license for $1 with any purchase a week later....?

d00d! My mixes have been languishing waiting for me to be able to look into the Volterra kernels of the plug-ins I've been using. ? Good lord, there are some things that interest me about Plug-In Doctor, but if I had it, I suspect it would be yet another thing to distract me from getting work done.

Woo, that is a nice deal on Mixcraft. I didn't know they were shipping Recording Studio with a full license for Melodyne Essentials, either, I thought you had to buy Pro Studio to get it. Mixcraft is a heckuva deal.

Do you have your gain staging dialed in? Plenty of level going in to the FX rack? Also, is it just these two FX or does it happen with any others? Do you hear the hiss with the transport stopped? Is "Cakewalk FxEq" the same as Sonitus:fx Equalizer (or Sonitus Equalizer), the paragraphic that comes with CbB?