Starship Krupa

Do you mean Sonar or Cakewalk by BandLab? If the former, go download the BandLab Assistant and get Cakewalk by BandLab. Sonar is old, unsupported stuff. It's fine to keep around for the plug-ins that came with it, but Cakewalk is way ahead in features, stability, and speed. You need to tell us whether you're using ASIO4ALL, WDM, WASAPI Exclusive, WASAPI Shared, or what as your audio driver. Also, you can get further information by right clicking on the speaker icon in your Windows system tray and selecting Open Sound Settings, and from the resulting page, select Device Properties. From there, you can select Additional Device Properties, then Properties again, Change Settings, keep drilling down until you see how your sound chip is actually set up to operate with Windows. It should be set at 24 bits 44, 100 for running with Cakewalk.

This is a known issue, and one that the developers have been trying to track down and correct. It has been difficult, as it does not happen on every system. @Noel Borthwick might like to take a look at a .cwb file of your project to see if the developers can track down what is causing the problem, so please Save As in this format. You might be of help to the process of fixing this. Are you using the very latest version of Cakewalk by BandLab?

You should check. It's at least been updated to the v10 core, don't know about the algorithm. I think I noticed in the release notes that it got some update having to do with supporting surround mixing. It has been solid as a rock on everything I've used it on since I first got it for free on that Black Friday giveaway years ago. I didn't like it at first because I thought it was too complicated, but then I figured out how to work with it in bozo mode and then some of the subtleties came through. The manual just confused the heck out of me because of the front and back thing, I was new to reverb and couldn't get a handle on it with all the controls. Turns out I didn't really need to work all of the controls if I didn't want to, just the usual size, early ref, etc. My complaint at the time was that it didn't come with enough preset examples to demonstrate what the manual was trying to explain, even with the "celebrity" ones I downloaded from the Waves site. Now I just dial in a nice hall or room sound and use it as a send like I do any other reverb and it sounds nice, sparkly and full, yet natural and neutral if I want it to be. It scales back well. I might delve into using the advanced features someday, but for now it's just a great-sounding algo reverb.

I wish I could unconditionally recommend SongKey. I've gotten some use out of it, certainly my discounted money's worth. With my complex, ringing guitar chords, it hasn't "done what it says on the tin." I'll say that it has helped me figure out the key of some of my weird songs, but as far as doing it all by itself, not really. It can pick out the individual notes I'm playing, which saves time on dissecting my big droning chords. I'm glad Saverio made it so the display freezes when you pause the transport. @Grem, I recall you're a big fan of LU Meter, which I see is on sale for €2.00. I have a few fancy LUFS meters like dpMeter4, MLoudnessAnalyzer and YouLean, does LU Meter do anything that these other LU meters don't? Obviously the money is nothing, it's just that I already have over 500 plug-ins, and LUFS is one of those things that is still kind of confusing for me, so another metering plug-in is something I'm cautious about acquiring.

Seems fishy to me.

It looks like Avid are turning their backs on the hobbyist and semi-pro segment and focusing on the stratosphere a la Sequoia and Pyramix. They know where their money is coming in from, I don't. This might signify that they acknowledge that so many in that segment have already turned to Logic, Cubase, Cakewalk, Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reaper, Samplitude, Waveform, Mixcraft et al that there's no sense in them trying to compete there. Is the DAWniverse split into these two segments: one where the users use the DAW as a music creation tool, composing, editing, recording, looping, making beats, singing, rapping, sampling, all that, and then another where the DAW is used strictly for recording, editing, mixing and mastering? From looking at the marketing pages for Sequoia and Pyramix, it would seem that way. Maybe Avid wants Pro Tools in that segment rather than bundling AIR softsynths and trying to come up with a performance panel or cloning some feature from Ableton Live, licensing loop packs, etc. If that market is lucrative enough, I actually think that might make sense for them, despite the traumatic effect it would have on the Pro Tools users in the other segment. Obviously, We Who Have Time To Post On Forums skew toward the hobbyist/semi-pro DAW-as-composing-tool segment, so we would tend to think it would be a shame for them to make such a move. What say ye?

TrueVerb is a great, natural-sounding reverb. It has a very thorough and comprehensive manual and if you dig into the Waves website's free downloads page, there's a file with celebrity presets including some good ones for TrueVerb.

Thank you, more precisely what Cakewalk by BandLab's licensing is is a free subscription, like Tape Op. We all know about Tape Op, right? Don't cost nothin', but once a year they contact you and at that time you need to confirm that you still want it and that your mailing address is still the same. Then they keep sending you your monthly issue. Similar deal with CbB, only the terms and mechanism are slightly different. There's a little program that contacts their servers and blesses your installation of CbB and it just needs to do that at least once every 6 months or CbB will slip back into demo mode. Anyone who wants to try to "bash" me for stating that obvious truth, step right up.

BandLab doesn't have a version of Sonar. Sonar was a program that used to licensed for a fee by a company called Cakewalk. Now a company called BandLab licenses a program called Cakewalk for free. Confusing, I know. All you need to know is that that Cakewalk is a thing. Sonar is defunct. It is no more. I have run Sampletank 3 under Cakewalk by BandLab and it has crashed the host program in both its VST2 and VST3 versions. I would not recommend attempting to run the combination in a live performance situation.

The L-Phase series would be such a joy to have available.

I love the way Mixcraft implemented it. Every folder is a submix, with full FX rack, automation, everything, and you can nest them infinitely and take stems from any of them you wish. Drag and drop a submix into another submix and it's nested. You can expand and collapse them to save screen real estate as you wish. The program also has buses that function just as buses do in Cakewalk. Mixcraft was obviously strongly influenced by Sonar, and it would be nice to see the influence come back around to Cakewalk.

Funny you should mention it, Grem, he already owns a Tascam Digital Portastudio, which he hasn't gotten around to using due to technophobia. I'm suggesting a workflow of tracking to the Tascam, then transferring to the notebook, where he can either work on it himself or pass it along to me. A friend bequeathed to me his Zoom Q8 camcorder with the X-Y mic pair and I did a band video shoot for some friends' 4-piece rock band using just the built-in X-Y pair and a single dynamic for the lead singer, and we were all very happy with the result. Now you know what my living room looks like. And my 1970 Slingerland New Rock kit (that's not me playing it).

Good to hear the news about Ryzen optimization. Also good to get the word on clock speed being the better thing to seek than number of cores. I'm trying to help a buddy spend some money on a Windows notebook, and he wants to run Cakewalk on it, he identifies as a comp-u-phobe and I figure that if he ever works his way up to 4 simultaneous tracks of audio that'll be pretty neat. He's been sending me iPhone Voice Memos of band practice jams that I've had fun seeing how good I can make sound using the tools I have available to me. I've been trying to ignite his interest from there by telling him that all he needs is a not-even-that-powerful notebook computer (I usually work my "magic" on my #2 system, an aging Core 2 Quad that just loves CbB), and he can get miles better audio quality even if he only just sets up a couple of dynamic mics into a mixer so he can give me a stereo recording to work with using the onboard sound chip. I know that anything that can boot Windows 10 would work for him, but I'd like to minimize his investment and maximize his gain. Keep it under a grand I guess. My hunch was AMD processor, go for clock speed, last year's technology? Optical drive might be nice to have for burning band CD's.

First, thank you for alerting me to the existence of this feature, second, I'm surprised it doesn't work that way in the first place. Or I would be if it weren't that Cakewalk seems rather non-real timey-wimey in odd places like when moving markers. Moving markers along the ruler always reminds me of playing fetch with a dog. I indicate where I want the marker to be and then it goes obediently charging off to take its place on the ruler. Same with moving clips and slip editing. I move a pale fragile ghost of the thing, then the actual thing comes along later.

Indeed, I agree that nested folders and submixes would make your task much simpler. There must be some way to adapt what I was suggesting, though, until such time as Cakewalk gets that feature. Perhaps by using Aux tracks? I would have to think about it more. How do you deal with this situation now when you are faced with it? Do you fork the project and set up all the routing manually as requested by the client? Do you do it in another DAW?

Another just outstanding theme, Matthew. I wish there were some kind of award I could nominate you for. And this theme should be called M-White?. I'm not a great fan of lighter themes myself, but this one I actually dig. Go figure. Are your latest "M" themes using what I think of as your "Netflix" wallpaper? I don't know because I have switched to my own custom one on my main DAW, but that was one sharp wallpaper, and served to remind me that I could set my own. I just wanted to sing your praises. I don't know why you do what you do, but if it's for "the nod," consider this a big one. Your work helps Cakewalk be more attractive and enjoyable for me to use, helps me to be enthusiastic about recording in general, and that's sharing the love.

Not once but twice for heaven's sake. And I wasn't being pedantic or nitpicking, it's common courtesy, and a gesture of parley when discussions like this one get heated, to show that one is not merely trolling. But I guess there wasn't much interest in that. I think it might be time to hit ye olde philtre of kille.

That's one of the goals of freezing an instrument/synth track, innit? Not only do you get the benefit of the FX' resources being freed up, you get the synth itself out of the picture as well. Not just the CPU, but I just checked what you said and CbB seems to be pretty good at unloading the synth from memory. I see that even the blessed Ref. Guide (BRG) doesn't do the best job of explaining this. It just says "to reduce the amount of CPU power needed," but thank heaven it extends to RAM as well. That's a dearer commodity around the Krupa household at the moment than CPU cycles. My CPU cores seem to mostly just sit around waiting for me to load an iZotope plug-in. For the benefit of others, from my experience with other DAW's, what's supposed to happen with frozen tracks is you get a fully-rendered audio version of a track so that you can use it for mixing, overdubbing, whatever and not incur the overhead of whatever plug-ins you loaded on the track. The host should "park" any track FX or synths until you unfreeze it, resulting in more CPU and memory for the other tracks to play with. This parking happens in a variety of ways to varying degrees of effectiveness depending on the host. Some hosts even let you decide what quality you want to use for frozen tracks, like you can use .OGG for frozen tracks in Mixcraft I think. It's good for when you want to track a lead vocal at low latency with this huge virtual sampled orchestral backing. Bang, freeze everything to OGG Vorbis and Mixcraft has the resource footprint of an MP3 player while your singer is singing to the LA Philharmonic and a rock band with a zillion effects. My hunch is that freezing an instrument track with FX is probably simple as things go, the DAW just needs to render a single track as it normally would and then unload the plug-ins. But un-freezing an instrument track seems like a task that would be fraught with a bit more danger. Depending on how the host turns the synth off, turning it back on might get weird. I've looked around and the only button for turning a synth plug-in on or off that I could find was in the Synth Rack, not in the Track Header or Console or plug-in UI. And what does this button do, exactly? Does it just grey out the UI or route audio around it or partially unload it from memory or what? It seems to reduce the memory usage a little more than freezing. Do does the host turn on the synth first and then the FX, or the FX first, or what? Lots of decisions. I tried to get some answers to these questions from other companies and crickets chirped. You know, stuff like "when I bypass a VST, does the audio route around it? Should I completely delete a VST from my plug-in rack to get it out of the audio path?"

It doesn't necessarily follow that there was something in the VST3 spec that allowed Melodyne to incorporate ARA, it just means that Celemony went along with the VST3=more advanced technology narrative. It's also a convenient way to filter out older hosts, because no host that only supports VST2 is going to support ARA. They might also have done it to get chummy or remain chummy with friends at Steinberg. I do you a favor now, you do us a favor down the road. As far as Vocal Rider, I just took a peek at it, and as I suspected, it does its thing via sidechaining. VST3 allowed Waves to have a button called "Sidechain" in the VST3 versions of its plug-ins. If you look at the instructions for the AAX and AU versions of Vocal Rider, they give the non-PlaySkool version that most other plug-in companies still use, where the host automatically sees that the plug-in has external inputs and creates routing for them. Nice position Steinberg was in: if the programmers of your host can't or don't want to figure out how to do that, like with Cubase and Nuendo, you can take the easy route (ha ha) and just come out with a new plug-in spec that forces the plug-in manufacturers to build sidechain routing into the plug-ins themselves. Make them do it for you! When I went to Steinberg's page on the (B)ST3 "revolution" and read the part about how plug-ins were now going to support this new thing "sidechaining," I had to stop for a moment and blink because I was wondering if they were talking about the same thing I had been doing for years. Nope, same thing, routing audio from a track to a plug-in on another track. Wow. Look around on the DAW forums, and the only people who think that the advent of the VST3 spec rocked their world are Cubase and Nuendo users who say that sidechain routing used to be a big pain in the....sidechain. Everyone else says they work exactly the same except maybe they crash more, and some people are worried that eventually hosts will stop supporting VST2's and then their favorite plug-ins will be useless. I like the VST3 spec for exactly one reason, and that is because in practice at least, it seems to set a standard location for plug-ins. I don't know how well that works out for people with humongous VSTi sample libraries, but I don't like chasing .DLL's all over the place trying to find ones that wound up in C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Vstplugins or whatever. Waves' installers are great, funny even, for putting their plug-ins in every place a host is likely to look for them.

That is pretty cool, and what I consider "above and beyond the call." Of course every company has to decide how they are going to handle this. Is the issue with the host's code or the plug-in's code? Is the plug-in dev interested in coming up with a patch? How much will it cost to come up with a patch? Do enough users use the plug-in that it's worth bothering with? It's funny what politics can come into play. (cough-cough) years ago I was on the QA team for a high-end photo editing program that was positioning itself as a challenger to Photoshop. Yeah, right? Well, if nobody had challenged Pro Tools, we wouldn't be here today. Our program could host the same plug-ins that Photoshop could, and photo plug-ins are subject to the same kind of weirdness that audio ones are. They could refuse to load, crash, crash us, crash the whole system, etc. Some of these plug-in companies I've noticed, are still around today, doing some amazing work. The thing was, our programmers HATED anything to do with these plug-ins with the fire of a thousand suns. This was for a number of reasons. First, Adobe had "created" the spec to work best with Photoshop just like VST was "created" to work best with Cubase. When did Ableton start supporting VST? Only in their last revision or something? In Pro Tools you still need a 3rd-party wrapper? The truth with these specs is that especially at first they're usually pretty sloppily drafted, and they're drafted after the programmers at the company are already coding plug-ins. These are programmers who have access to every line of code in the host program, so they can do it without the spec anyway. On the host side, what incentive do they have to make things easy for their competition? Just being nice? Is Steinberg going to smooth the waters for Digidesign and Cakewalk and PreSonus and Ableton and ImageLine and Magix? Is it any wonder that so many rejected VST for so long? Cakewalk bet on DX, Digi went their own way, the others have their own proprietary systems and VST support is or was a premium option. So outside Adobe, all we and the 3rd party plug-in devs had to go on was this roughly-drafted spec that may not have been drafted to encourage Adobe's competitors to succeed in the first place, knowhatimean? Second, the people who had made these plug-ins only had Photoshop to work with and test with, and they were not that enthusiastic about possibly having a second program on the scene to make sure their products were compatible with. It was hard enough to work with Adobe. They had little interest in seeing us succeed. Third, third-party add-ons in general are just a pain in the tuchus to deal with. Introducing elements over which you have no control into your system is inviting trouble. What this all boiled down to was they would give us these great state-of-the-art plug-in packs to play with, and when they would crash the snot out of our program, our poor devs had no leverage whatsoever with the plug-in houses and their devs because their code had been burnished to a fine gloss to work smoothly with Photoshop. So any query about bad behavior was answered with "works fine with Photoshop." Whether it obeyed the published spec or not, all that mattered was "works fine with Photoshop." So hard to pinpoint the blame when a VSTi plug-in was coded using the Steinberg SDK and tested in-house and in beta in Cubase and Reaper and StudioOne and then the developer gets a report that CbB chokes after their synth comes out of a freeze. CbB works fine with hundreds of other VSTi's doing the same operation. Sektor works fine with a dozen other hosts (if you flip the VST2/3 coin a couple of times). CbB probably didn't exist in its current form when the synth was developed. Whaddaya bet that the next rev of Sektor fixes this issue?

I'm having a conniption fit over here. That's treating your product as a public beta. No wonder SONAR got a reputation for being a crash test dummy. BandLab seem to be running a tighter ship. You know, developers hate shipping software with bugs in it, it's like if we shipped a master with unwanted digital clipping in it or a dropout or an accidentally muted track or whatever. To me, this would be like if every record shipped with 5 different but similar mixes/masters, and not the "dance remix" or "2019 remaster" but the one the drummer did while the rest of the band was out buying brownies at the dispensary, and the one that the guitar player and his girlfriend liked, then the one that the producer and the record company liked, then one that had a killer feel but Don screwed up on that one part but they left it in, then one that everyone thought sounded good but the hi hat sounded ice-picky in the car, and the consumer is supposed to pick whichever one works the best on their system. If the "Don drops a clam" mix sounds jarring, try the one with the forward guitars. Don't sound good? Try the one that's all drums.

Yes, and I am amazed for the reason I said.

Oh good heavens, things were worse than I thought. Really? Wow. I wasn't kidding when I said that I'd never seen (nor heard of) any software company doing that, and given the egos I encountered when I was in the software biz, I find it astonishing. An OS update, yes, but they're usually touting the latest update as having fixed everything.

I've never seen any software company do that and it's hard to imagine one doing it. You get why: it's the equivalent of saying "we have so little faith in our QA process that we have this handy option for you to get rid of the latest and greatest improved version in case we've fscked it up." It will simply. Never. Happen.

Oh boy, can of worms there. Glad it's working. Cakewalk will substitute a VST3 for a VST2 if the plug-ins have a certain internal identifier set. Not every company uses this, so sometimes both plug-ins will show up in the pick lists in Cakewalk. Meldaproduction famously does not use the matching internal identifier, so I have to disable my 38 Meldaproduction VST2's using the Plug-In Manager. It's kind of funny that they thought that the "more advanced" VST3 would be the one that would have the problem! I'm not surprised, though, as my other DAW, Mixcraft, really doesn't like VST3's, to the point that as much as possible I avoid them when using Mixcraft. A sidenote, I'm just venting and it won't help paolo a bit, but this is the kind of thing that had me spitting nails when I dug more deeply into what was really behind Steinberg's much-touted VST3 spec and how little it actually covered and how little it was likely to improve things. Protecting the host and the plug-in from each other in case of errors, a standard protocol for trapping and handling errors, those are things that could have been part of a new VST spec that might have actually improved things, but instead what the industry got was mostly forced duplication of features that other companies had already implemented like sidechaining and GUI scaling. There was no big revolution where suddenly with VST3 my plug-ins started getting scalable GUI's and sidechaining, they all already had it if it were applicable. All I saw was plug-ins started to be distributed in both formats that worked exactly the same. Except the VST3 versions had more of a tendency to crash. I'm sure that for people who write these plug-ins, they write the code, then the development environment poops out various versions of the plug-in at compile time. We're at the mercy of the development environment and compiler when it comes to whether they're going to work well.