Starship Krupa

Ah, Steev, a thing to know is that I am very frugal, especially when it comes to my music hobby. The Firepod is ancient technology. Studio One was but a glimmer in the eye of Presonus when my interfaces were new. I got the pair of mine a few years back on Craig's List. 16 inputs for $200! So I have no right to the copy of Studio One, at least as far as I know. And doesn't the starter edition omit support for VST's? Can't live without that. Anyway, Studio One was one of the ones I tried a few years back before I settled on Mixcraft, and for whatever reason rejected. It may have been the limitation on VST's or the UI, but I preferred starting with something that wasn't a hobbled version of a "real" DAW anyway. My main system is a Dell Optiplex that a neighbor gave me. He works down in Silicon Valley as a facilities manager, and one of the companies he works for was getting rid of some desktops that were no longer fancy enough for the executives. He brought some of them home, asked me if I had a use for this one. Um, yes, as a matter of fact. Its predecessor, which is still in use, and runs Cakewalk with aplomb, was a hand-me-down Gateway Core 2 Duo that had been my friend's daughter's high school computer. When she got a Macbook for graduation, I got the Gateway, which was having trouble booting up. I cured that by reseating the IC's, upgraded the processor to a Core 2 Quad, and with a hand-me-down 125G SSD for a boot drive, it's running great. The young lady who bequeathed it was almost done with college last time I heard. The Event 30/30's in my sig were obtained for free because one side had a blown chip amp, and the Monitor Ones were $30 at a swap meet. I don't like to part with cash unless I have to. I hope we hear from LarryC soon! ?

I was most recently using Mixcraft before Gibson and then BandLab dropped their sad and then happy bombs. Mixcraft is kind of "the little DAW that could." 5 years ago I wanted to get back into home recording after more than 10 years away from it, so I shopped around and the best bang for the short-of-buck was, IMO, Mixcraft. I had tried REAPER before, and gave it another brave try, but it ended in bafflement and disappointment as it always has. One of my benchmarks for a DAW is "how long does it take me, from a cold start, without cracking a manual or help file, to be able to record 30 seconds of audio and then edit the middle 10 seconds out of it?" Many will concur that with REAPER, depending on the individual, this might be measured in hours or even days rather than minutes. And while, yes, REAPER does have a robust and active user forum, there is a whiff of that Linux-y "if you're having trouble using the software, you're a doofus" attitude, where it seemed like there was an uncomfortable priority placed on maintaining an image of REAPER as being just as beginner-friendly and easy-to-use as its competitors. So if a newbie posted that they were flummoxed by the weird-ass workflow, too much emphasis was on "defending" rather than just explaining. This may have improved now that the program is more secure in the market. If there are any REAPER fans here, before you get in my grill, I'll just say that I know REAPER is powerful. It is so, so powerful. Its power is too much for a mind as small as mine to comprehend, which is why I must never, ever be in the same room with it. It's likely that the reason that it took me over 2 hours to arm a track, record a clip, and chop 10 seconds out of it was that because in REAPER, a track can be anything you want it to be. It can be an audio track, a MIDI track, a bus, a video track, a score track, an automation lane, a patch bay, a quiet place to while away a few hours while the family is out of the house, the gum you stuck to the underside of your chair in 6th grade, the sensation of heat, or the concept of sensation itself. So I probably had created a "gum" track when I should have created an "audio" track, and when I clicked what I thought was "arm" probably meant "chew." Or I had chosen the wrong color of audio, which had to be selected ahead of time or else nothing would work. The company who makes Mixcraft on the other hand, Acoustica, their motto is "Software should be easy to use!" True to this, my test took 2.5 minutes to complete once the program had finished installing. Another trick for checking out DAW's is to read their user forum and see if people are shrieking like the souls of the damned about uncorrected bugs and missing or poorly implemented basic features that span major releases. Mixcraft is very good about staying current on the bug fixes. Their dev team is responsive. The price was hard to beat, under a hundy for something that had no restrictions as far as track count and would handle VST's. Also rudimentary video editing. You can put in fades and transitions and overlay text and stuff. I spent a few years with Mixcraft, really I learned my DAW chops with it. But I was starting to outgrow it, and happily, that coincided with BandLab's announcement. My biggest complaint with it vs. Cakewalk is the console. Mixcraft's console is so feature-challenged that almost all mixing I have to do in Mixcraft, I do in the Track View. I only set up cue mixes in the Console. And of course, Cakewalk's Console is un-freaking-REAL. Also Cakewalk's playback engine sounds better. I ran some tests with sine sweeps and there were artifacts (many digital audio programs have them, you might be surprised) whereas SONAR tested relatively clean, so that may be an explanation, but I could hear a difference right away. One feature where Mixcraft whips Cakewalks butt is in the robustness of that playback engine. I was/am on the Mixcraft beta team, and if their playback engine just stopped, and it kept stopping under the same conditions, be they heavy RAM or CPU load or whatever, you'd write that up as a bug report and they'd set about fixing whatever is wrong with the program that is causing it to do that. There's not a blue window that pops up saying how "unfortunate" it is that playback went casters-up in the middle of your mixing session. So that was, uh....different. I had gotten used to being able to do just about anything I wanted to with the playback running. Their way of handling submix buses by dragging and dropping, and how they can be nested as many times as you wish is really fab. Submixes act the same way that "track folders" do in Cakewalk, there's no distinction. You can collapse them and MSR all the tracks underneath and all of that. But weak mixer console, take lanes that you can't collapse, VST3 handling that's still kinda iffy, weak keyboard shortcuts, no support for theming, weaker MIDI routing. It's still a "starter DAW," albeit a very good one that can play with the big players in many situations. Despite the quality of the product, I suspect that they may fall to BandLab's pricing scheme on the current Cakewalk.

Oh holy mother, really? Still? When I was notation-shopping I settled on Finale Note Pad, which is freeware, like our CbB, so I guess I missed out on how prevalent this still is, but I've encountered it in other programs. It's like there was a Procrustes Bach (Procrustes was the serial killer/blacksmith in Greek paganism who had an iron bed; he would invite travelers in to stay the night and if they didn't fit the bed perfectly he would either chop off anything that stuck out, or stretch them until their limbs "fit.") who came up with this. You try to tidy things up a little bit, or decide that you want that note to sustain just a bit longer and BLEAHHH suddenly your measure and the one next to it are littered with little dots and rests and hemidemisemiquavers to make up for it. Which makes it worse, it looks like a caterpillar stepped in some ink and walked across scoring paper. Heaven help you if you play a chord and your finger slips, or if you decide you want to voice the chord a bit differently and then throw the timing off with the slip of a mouse. The results look worse than having "slide over to make room" turned on in CbB (sorry). Every time I tried to get "serious" about producing sheet music of my stuff for other musicians to use and tried one of these programs, it made me just drop the project entirely until I started working with Finale and then Mixcraft (which also seems more forgiving). I am very happy to hear that Cakewalk doesn't do this. It made me feel like I was in some horrible Dickensian math class, had made a mistake, and was being punished by a Snape-like instructor. Or like that movie I saw the trailer for that seemed to be about having The Great Santini for a drum teacher.

Better than almost! I just upgraded both my main DAW system and my notebook from Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free using this guide: https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/ And I have to say, I'm not as impressed as everyone else seems to be about Windows 10's performance. With the main DAW, it seems to be about like it was before performance-wise, so it's kinda what's the big deal, but with the notebook, it seems more sluggish. The notebook is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it's well within the specs for running both Windows 10 and Cakewalk. It's an i5 dual core 2.67GHz, and I upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 for the occasion. The HD is 7200RPM. Graphics drivers are the latest from nVidia. I'm planning on getting an SSD or SSHD for it in the near future to try to get a couple more years out of it. Kinda underwhelmed by Windows 10 on the notebook. The first computer around here that I put Windows 10 on was my older Gateway Q6600 Core 2 Quad with 8G of RAM and it's still a happy camper, Runs Cakewalk just fine. The difference with it was that I put a hand-me-down 125G SSD in it as its C drive when I rebuilt it as a Windows 10 system. This makes me think that Windows 10 might be more reliant on a fast boot/system disk than 7. I dunno.

This may be little known to new users, but along with all the other wonderful free plug-ins we get with Cakewalk, there are 4 that come with it that by default are disabled. They are great plug-ins, too, and well worthy of the small effort it takes to enable them. They are: VX-64 Vocal Strip, which is a "swiss army knife" multi-processor oriented toward vocals that includes a de-esser, a doubler, a compressor/expander, a tube eq with saturation, a delay (with filter), and tube saturation on the input and output stages. The 5 modules can be routed in any order. Obviously these tools may be used on many sounds other than vocals. This is a very useful plug-in. PX-64 Percussion Strip, a similar format multi-processor aimed at processing percussion tracks that includes a transient shaper, a compressor/expander, eq with "vintage" and "classic" modes, delay (with filter), and tube saturation on the input and output stages. The modules may be routed in any order. Noting the similar complement of modules to the VX-64, I assume that each is more tuned to the specific application, percussion or vocals. Again, there is tube saturation emulation on the inputs and outputs. TL-64 Tube Leveler, a tube saturation and compression emulator. For when digital seems too clinical. Season to taste. Boost 11, a peak limiter/volume maximizer with a nice display of the waveforms before and after processing. To be able to use them in Cakewalk, from the main menu, select Utilities/Cakewalk Plug-In Manager. Once Plug-In Manager is running, select VST Audio Effects (VST) under Plug-In Categories on the left side. This will give you a list, in the middle pane, of enabled VST2 plug-ins. That's fine, but we are not interested in that for now. Down below, under Manage Exclusion List, click the button next to Show Excluded. This will change the list to show excluded VST2 plug-ins. Look for the names of the 4 plug-ins. Once you have found them, click on each one and click on the button labeled Enable Plug-In. The names will disappear from the Excluded list. Exit from Plug-In Manager and you should now be able to use all 4 VST effects in your projects. Note: for whatever reason, I have sometimes found these plug-ins back on the Excluded list after an update to Cakewalk. If this happens, just repeat the process and you will be fine.

Oh, no kidding! When I first downloaded CbB, which was just a few days after the announcement, I exported raw audio stems from my previous DAW of a couple of projects I had been working on for months, using my favorite plug-ins. I decided to just fiddle around with Cakewalk using as many of the included plug-ins as possible and try to get a decent-sounding mix. ....and was blown away by first how quickly I was able to surpass my efforts in the DAW I was so familiar with, and second, by how capable and great-sounding the ProChannel modules were. I still have and use my specialty FX like MAutoAlign and Gatey Watey, and my "cheaters" from iZotope, but those ProChannel modules stopped dead my search for an 1178 clone, and I had already snagged the CLA2A when it was a freebie a couple of years ago. The QuadCurve EQ pretty much replaced my use of MEQualizer. And that's not to mention the Sonitus DX FX, which sound great. The only issue I have with them is that they look kinda homely, but as far as sound , operation, and features they are great. Multiband compressors are few in the freeware world and the Sonitus DX one is a treat.

My biggest beef with selecting FX from the insert menu is that my mouse scroll wheel doesn't function when scrolling down the list!

MacOS, Linux, it would be great to have Cake-alikes on all of them, but I would see as a likelier path partnering with an existing Macintosh DAW manufacturer to build in some or all of the BandLab integration that Cakewalk has. Cakewalk was probably a very desirable purchase for BL because it had been orphaned (hence a bargain, and a fit with the company's fondness for picking up good old respectable brands) and was already mature code. A from-the-ground-up DAW project would be a different thing and require a development team familiar with the MacOS environment. It's my impression that Cakewalk and Microsoft had a close relationship. With Apple, Cakewalk would be a competitor to Logic. I'd love to see it, but I doubt that we will.

Oh yes, this. It was so tough to figure out how to do it in the first place, too. Not the most intuitive process. Navigable once you know how, but the road to knowing how was ?. Considering the importance of the piano roll view for me when putting together beats, it was daunting.

I second that recommendation for the amp sim from Blue Cat. I was impressed with that one, and also Boogex from Voxengo. Less guitar specific, big ups on the Sonitus plug-ins that come with Cakewalk and the FX that are there on the ProChannel. You can spend a good long time just getting to know those and making great sounds. The Free Bundle from http://www.meldaproduction.com/ is a trusty favorite of mine. Go to iZotope and pick up their freebies, the Vocal Doubler is especially good. www.pluginboutique.com is an online dealer but has a collection of freeware plugins from various sources, in addition to regularly running deals on $1 and $5 plug-ins. Right now you can get most of the Soundspot line for $1 each, and I like their stuff. If you have any interest at all in softsynths, they have Hybrid 3 for $1 and Xpand! 2 for $4.99

First bit of timesaving info: when they start going on about the "PRV," that means Piano Roll View. ?

Whoa, Mark, that's rad that you're concerned about, like, other users' diverse communication styles. 'cause, totally, I hear ya, bro, without the "California" under my avatar, people have, like, no idea. ?

I have noticed something odd, which is that the avatars of two BandLab staffers seem at first to show them having hairdos that I don't think they actually sport in real life. By which I mean that when I look closely, I don't think that Jesse actually wears his hair in a mullet, nor do I believe that Noel has a flat top. Is it just me? Maybe they do have these hairstyles and I have it backward. Is it the "portholes" that we make our avatars fit inside now?

I guess this is payback for my "I'll never let them harvest my precious AOL address book!!" rants on TOP. Whatever happened to that poor feller? The SONAR Platinum lifer who was convinced that the whole point of the CbB project was to distribute spyware, and that anyone who believed otherwise was just being naive. Probably still waiting for the grand plot to be exposed....

You're also using WDM with an interface whose drivers support ASIO. Unless you're required to as part of a Living History project, why not take your free upgrade to Cakewalk by BandLab? While you're at it, that sweet motherboard and all that RAM and that nice video card might love ASIO mode.

Hello, cats and kittens. It'll be interesting to become reacquainted with some personae with new handles. I've got a new handle (although I'm keeping the "smile on the EQ" avatar), which I had been planning along with a less ironic manner. Users from the old digs would remember me as "Euthymia" if they remembered me at all. I hereby pledge to give up my favorite sport of taunting those casting doubts upon the new product's licensing model (my battle cry: "ever heard of Google Chrome?") in favor of using this new forum to help people use the software. That is, now that I stand a chance of finding people with less experience using Cakewalk than I have! (joy to the WORLD!)

Heh, maybe for a similar reason that I know better than to ask my friends' kids if they use "Live," because nobody calls it that, they call it "Ableton."