Starship Krupa

Only if a person thinks that when a product is renamed it becomes abandoned. It also depends on what one wishes to connote by the term "abandonware." It's a flexible term. No, it is no longer supported by the company that originally sold licenses for it. Neither is Windows XP. There are newer products with different names that are successors to Windows XP. Is the company that is distributing licenses for its successor devoting resources to pursuing licensing violations of Sonar? Doubtful, especially in light of how licenses for the current product are free. If anyone out there is pirating copies of Sonar when Cakewalk is being distributed for free, they need help, not legal censure. In my opinion, the most accurate term for what Sonar's status is is "discontinued."

From almost the day I downloaded and installed CbB I have had a fierce jones for L-Phase Multiband (and L-Phase Equalizer). Wondering when and if BandLab were going to make them available for sale or as a promo or whatever. I just happened to have an old Gibson/Cakewalk account left over from the CA-2A giveaway. Today is my birthday. You have made me a very happy man. Anyone who has a Gibcake logon and for whatever reason doesn't have these or Rapture, run, don't walk.

Oh, I see, those clip colors will only change to grey if I haven't set my own colors. I presume then that they will also take on whatever default clip colors other themes apply.

Let's see. Similar questions, your a) and 2). In case a) you are saving a scene, and you want to know if you've saved the project. No, you have not. And yes, a good indicator that you haven't is if there is an asterisk next to the project name in Cakewalk's title bar. Now in case 2) you want to know whether when you save a scene you have also saved the project. Nope. And if you see an asterisk next to the project's filename up in the title bar, that means that there has been some change made and the project file not saved since that change. In short, no to both.

Interesting, Larry, mine is still there, but then I was already on 1809 when I enabled it. Perhaps major updates are when the Microsoft Safety Police check to make sure we haven't done anything that might get us into trouble and nudge us back onto the right path. And if you pay extra for the Pro version, they ease up on the nudges, because they know you're a Pro, see? Well, the thing is, I may not be a "Pro" in Microsoft's eyes, but I'm a punk and a hacker. Characteristic of both of those cultures is a love of getting things to do what they're not supposed to do, and a distaste for being kept away from things. Big props and good on ya for running your 8-track studio in Hollywood. I bet you got to work with cooler clients, too, rather than babysitting coked-out has-beens. I never went all-in with punk musically, but I embraced the anti-elitism and DIY ethics part of it (and still do). If the mainstream scene won't let you in, start your own scene. Everybody gets to record, everybody gets to play. All-ages, everybody gets to come to the show. Learn as you go. When I was 21, I was a broke dude in the early '80's working full-time at low-paying jobs and living in tiny apartments, scraping to keep my car running to get to work. I wanted more than anything to work at a recording studio, learn how to be a recording and mix engineer. I had some background installing and repairing audio installations from working summer jobs at a couple of theme parks so I knew how to solder, understood impedance, etc. I went to a couple of studios in the town where I lived, Santa Barbara, which had a few studios that were solidly booked, being near LA. Just to talk to someone about whether they needed anyone to work on their gear or what have you, see if anyone had any advice about entry level jobs in the recording industry. The sheer friggin' arrogance and dismissiveness I encountered from these bearded fscks was amazing. It boiled down to if they liked me I could come in and make coffee and sweep up for no pay, but they already had a kid who was doing that, so maybe check back later. And they didn't say this nicely, either. So you basically had to be someone who was living off daddy's money and could afford to work for free for a year or two on the chance that these hippie dickheads might start paying you. Yeah, no. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to be part of that culture. I said screw all of that and bought Craig's first book and never looked back.? Started recording to my home stereo cassette deck, then a cassette 4-track. Now I can track 16 channels of 96/24 at once in my dining room on hardware and software that cost me, in toto, about $300.

Wouldn't BandLab itself be pretty fab for this? I haven't tried it yet for moving stems around, but isn't it already set up for this kind of thing? I collaborate with a PT user and so far we've used Google Drive and MEGA, but I was hoping to try BL at some point. Does BandLab allow WAV or at least FLAC?

Good advice to keep those notebook air vents clean. I forget to do it. I don't know what the Twelve Tone era Cakewalk looked like, but as far as "light" themes go, head down to the Coffee House subforum and check out the "Boston Flowers" theme that Mariano just dropped. It's my new favorite light theme.

I found that my Windows 10 systems were better behaved after I permanently turned off realtime Windows Defender scanning, but Microsoft definitely do not make it easy for users of Home versions to do that. If I tell you that it requires enabling a tool that Microsoft ships as hidden by default and then using that tool to turn off a "safety feature" that Microsoft won't otherwise allow you to turn off and you've already started Googling how to do it before finishing this sentence, then you're a good candidate. ? You have to enable Group Policy Editor, which ships hidden on Home versions of Windows 10, and then use it to turn off realtime scanning, which Windows rather arrogantly informs the user that it will only allow the user to do temporarily before turning it back on. When confronted with this message I took it upon myself to restore the natural order of User and Tool in my home and did a spot o'Googlin'. There's also a registry hack that will do it without all the Group Policy Editor business, but it's nice to have Group Policy Editor available. Do this at your own risk; so far the only annoyance I encountered was a user on this forum who implied that it was somehow unethical to configure OS features from a command line or using regedit. Or something. It wasn't entirely clear what he was on about. Anyway, if you believe that it's unethical or against the terms of your license agreement to use anything but a GUI to configure your OS, then you should pass.

Bummer when an old favorite becomes abandonware. My favorite audio file format converter is Mediahuman, which is freeware, cross-platform, and can handle just about any format, bitrate, bit depth, etc. MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, in both directions. When I finish a mix, I render once to WAV with the DAW and then use Mediahuman to generate the different formats for distribution. https://www.mediahuman.com/audio-converter/ If you need disc burning, InfraRecorder still works great and requires no serial numbers: http://infrarecorder.org/

Which leads me to an annoyance, which is that by default, the installer associates .mid files with Cakewalk. I doubt that everyone who installs Cakewalk wants to edit a MIDI file with it every time they double-click on one. Do they? I usually just want to listen to it.

Hey, The Chandler is here. Good to see you. (Euthymia at the old forum and KVR)

I ran into that problem myself, and it turned out that I had the wrong option set somewhere. For some reason it was set to snap to a grid, so I'd try to move a blob and it would keep snapping back to its original location. I figured "this just can't be happening, it can't be the way this works," so I dug into the help file and figured it out. I unchecked the option and voila, Melodyne started letting me move the blobs and they stayed where I moved them and the pitch changed. Wish I could remember it offhand so I could share it with you, but it was months ago and I haven't used it since. Try looking for a way to turn off snapping to grid, or switching it to snap to scale or something. You might ask about this in the Q&A or main forum before you give up on Melodyne. When I got it working properly, it worked a treat and was easy to use and very natural sounding. Good luck!

Fab Filter is like a Ferrari of EQ 's. I usually like to mess about with some more economy versions before shelling out for a top-of-the-line item like that. That way I can learn what features are important to me. It has a great-looking UI, I can see, but then so does the great-sounding EQ in iZotope Ozone Elements, which I got a license for when I bought a license for Hybrid for $1. I will echo what others have said here: the Quad Curve is a very fine EQ indeed, and Meldaproduction's free MEQualizer will take care of most of your other needs. Nova 67P is a good freeware dynamic EQ if you wish to experiment with one of those. Nobody has mentioned a "color" EQ, so I'll mention one of my favorites, freeware, natch. Lkjb Luftikus. Standard 6 rotary knob analog-style EQ, great for touch-ups.

It's my current favorite "light" theme, Mariano. One thing I found odd, though: when I applied it, I had a project open using Mattthew White's M-Spec, my current favorite "dark" theme. The project has 4 tracks, and the tracks have pink, blue, green, and orange colors set. When I applied Boston Flowers, all of the tracks lost their colors, turned to your default grey.

Thanks Dave. I was afraid of that. Not my first one.

You are busted as a total John Lennon clone, then. ? But yes, cool indeed. The shades and the expression are very much my "1985 face." The ladies loved it. I looked more like the guy in The Jam, though. The '80's were my least favorite decade so far, but the silver lining was that as a 20-something, I had plenty to be disaffected about. ?

I find the Project/Record Preferences page to be perhaps one of the most confusing things about Cakewalk, and one area where the documentation is not much help to me. For instance, this choice, when I call up Help, it says "If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different Take lanes when this option is enabled." First, it implies that it only works if you have your Take Lanes expanded, which....that would be kinda odd. Is this its true behavior? Second, okay, fine, I record mostly in Loop mode, so with every iteration, my clips are going to overlap, and I'll want a new take lane. But what if I didn't have this checked? What would happen? Would my clips just pile up on top of each other? If so, it would be nuts not to have this enabled, the result would be disastrous. What actually happens?

Indeed. Another reason I bailed on the commercial software biz. Every company wanted to "go public." When I left, I swore that I never wanted to work for another publicly traded company again. As soon as the company became publicly traded, it stopped being about selling our product and started being about putting on a shadow play for analysts. You and I agree on many points about economics, Notes. (I want to call myself "Rests") Anyway, I'm enthusiastic and optimistic about Bandlab's experiment. I can envision their collaboration platform becoming popular on a certain scale, and I can see many ways that Cakewalk will fit into it. It's no mystery to me how it could all work, and it'll be pretty neat if it does. If it fizzles, and development stops, I'll be left with this great DAW software and will have to rely the people who own it to continue the free subscription or be kind enough to release a version with a perpetual key. For the value I'm getting now, it all seems quite worth the risk.

Someone once affectionately (I hope) described me as "one of those annoying 'glass half-full' people." Like that guy in your avatar pic, it's hard-won. And I can usually back it up with examples and facts. Just stating what is possible if it goes right. Anything can go wrong. Put a bad manager in the mix, an untalented programmer or two, I've seen plenty of promising products die sad deaths. I was at Macromedia when they killed Deck. ? Yes, one of the early, very promising DAW's, I was firsthand witness to its downfall. Freeware is fun, but requires sifting through, vetting. Bedroom Producers Blog is great at that. That's where I learned that Cakewalk had gone freebie. Maybe I'll start a thread in the Coffee House for "other happening freeware." It's so easy to wind up with 30 compressors and 25 EQ's when one should really focus on getting to know maybe 5 of each, if that many. If somebody said to me "you can't get a top-quality mix using all freeware plug-ins" I'd say, "perhaps that's true in your case." OrilRiver reverb, Unlimited limiter, Reaplugs collection, Dead Duck FX, there are some fine things out there.

Of course not. Microsoft exists to make money, and everything they do is to that end And I hope nobody thinks that I believe that BandLab's licensing model arises from altruism. The company BandLab exists to make money, and everything they do will be to that end. Meng as an individual may be a guy with altruistic principles, but that's not what corporations do. The concept that I have been trying to hammer is that there are legitimate paths to making money that are not directly "I make a thing and you hand me money for getting to own it or use it or experience it." Even in what we do, it's been this way for a long time, at least at the semi-pro level. Bands can lose money on the door, but make money on selling merchandise, or lose money on recording and printing CD's, but make a pile on touring and merchandise, or break even on printing t-shirts but make money on downloading songs or whatever. Printing fliers never made money, but we did it because punk bands HAD to have a flier for every gig. Kids collected them. One activity loses money, but promotes and props up another that makes money. It shouldn't be so difficult for people to get that this might also be the case in the business of online social media marketing and associated apps. BandLab had existing freeware DAW's when they acquired the IP from the former Cakewalk company. One for iOS and one for Android. Or maybe that was one, for two different platforms, whatever. And the one that runs in Google Chrome browser. Cakewalk was just adding another. Maybe they'll get one for Macintosh OSX at some point. When we talk about Cakewalk in the context of BandLab's software business, it's really "Cakewalk and the other BandLab DAW's," because they were already a software company. If we want to know how good they are, we should be checking the reviews for their other DAW's in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

I believe this to be the wisest course of action whatever one's commitment/choice of main DAW. I came for the price and stayed for the ProChannel and the sound, and became a booster based on observing the nimble development. If the tool became unavailable to me tomorrow, I'd go back to Mixcraft and the search would start for another DAW. I'm throwing myself into learning the intricacies of using Cakewalk. I don't expect the time and effort will be wasted. That's the thing, for all the hot air thrown back and forth about trusting Cakewalk to be around in the future, well, what if it isn't? It's up to the wise user to future-proof their studio and skills by making them not dependent on one single tool.

Got no Kontakt?

Andy, you and I have more in common than we knew. I've done some mechanical design and drafting in my career, mostly sheet metal, and I was/am a pretty good printed circuit board designer. I'm old enough to have learned with pencils and tape and then switched to CAD in '83. So you've already been exposed to the changes resulting from what I'm talking about: AutoCAD (I interviewed there a couple of times) was one of the first houses that I know of to switch to the subscription model. And you were there, the clients howled at first. I still have a gut-level dislike for that model, first because I like to own things, and second, I do a lot of different things and I might not even use Photoshop or whatever for a couple of months, and my middle name is Scott, if you get me (it actually is). I don't want to be paying a monthly subscription fee and then not using the program that month. But in a market where we can have brothers and sisters still happily running Sonar 8.5, how can people make money from selling shrinkwrapped software? My buddy Geoff whom I've mentioned around here, the Pro Tools man, he was one of these Pro Tools users who was Krazy Glued to Pro Tools 10. I guess PT 10 was where they made some architectural changes and dropped support for the PowerPC architecture on MacOS and some of their own interfaces, and early upgraders reported snags and it led to a lot of FUD. PT10 won't run on OSX past a certain revision and all this, basically your studio will be frozen in 2011 if you have it. But he has this beautiful Mac Pro tower, and I was trying to collaborate with him, and I was sending him deals on plug-ins and asking him to download conversion software so we could both use FLAC, and his system didn't support anything. The software I wanted him to run wouldn't run on the old OSX, PT10 didn't know what a FLAC was, PT10 didn't know what an AAX plug-in was so none of the cool free and $1 Pluginboutique deals I sent him were any good. He started doing everything on his iPhone because his computer couldn't run anything. I finally called BS and said we're going to get you on PT11. This can't go on. By the time I got him to budge, it was even PT12. I researched everything, and it looked like Avid had gotten their act together, and in the end it worked great, he was so stoked he maxed everything on the Pro out, and because he had bought the thing so many years earlier, he could fill it with all the RAM and SSD's he wanted for peanuts compared to when he first bought it. He went from 4G of RAM to 32, converted entirely to SSD. The thing runs like a rocket sled now. And we even have his whole PT10 system hard disk as a time capsule in case something goes wrong.?‍♀️ He bought the "perpetual" license (sorry if anyone cringed), but it was way difficult to find that option and choose it over the subscription. they really, really want you on that monthly gravy train. That's what their business model is these days. Anyone who wants the other, old kind of license is treated as an anomaly. And I'm sure we all know, Adobe has followed AutoDesk into all-subscription land. Or they tried. Did they make it stick? So maybe we should think of Cakewalk's license not as "here's a copy for free," but rather as a subscription that costs $0.00 per 6 months. I don't know if BandLab's experiment is going to work. As a software industry veteran and industry observer (and very briefly, writer for InfoWorld) I am fascinated to see where it goes, though. This freeware thing is becoming way more widespread. My computer was already full of freeware before Cakewalk by BandLab appeared. I have 3 Windows systems, all were running Windows 7 until a month ago. Microsoft just did the same thing that BandLab does and gave me 3 free licenses for their current OS, Windows 10.

I guess I found a second wind ?. It's all in good fun. Perhaps I twigged that you were an okay bloke who could take in new information. ? So. Since you mention concerns about the quality of the product going forward, there's an odd thing about software quality, and it's one of the reasons I've been so stalwart about defending BandLab's licensing Cakewalk as freeware. 20 years ago I was an in-demand software QA engineer, worked at some of the biggies (Adobe/Macromedia, Berkeley Systems, Informix). One of the biggest reasons that I left the field is that I came to the insight that there is an inherent disincentive to quality in shrinkwrap software (which means the kind Sonar was, stuff bought by regular consumers). Back in my day it was sort of an "elephant in the room." Nowadays books and articles have been written about it, and I hope at least that companies know that they need to be aware of it and try to safeguard against it. The big problem is that what sells licenses, and this includes new licenses and upgrades, is new features. Protest all you want otherwise, but that is the truth, we all, and rightly so, in my opinion, consider bug fixes something that we shouldn't have to pay for, at least not the cost of what the usual shrinkwrap upgrade goes for. It's part of why companies are trying to go to a subscription licensing model: once a product gets to a certain point of maturity, having to grub for licenses by coming up with a dozen attractive whiz-bang features every 6 months can become unsustainable. It may be that the market becomes saturated, it may be that there are only so many features that can be added, whatever. But that's getting ahead of things. For the sake of our model, let's look at "coding" as a black box that we pour money into and get software out of. And coding bug fixes costs the same as programming new features. Now if we switch our Coding black box over to bug fixes, it's the same as turning it off, because bug fixes don't make us money. However, even turned off, we're still pouring money into it. We're still paying the programmers and all of the other infrastructure that supports them. So bug fixes cost money! From the point of view of short sighted managers, and short sighted managers are unfortunately everywhere, they're even bad! If you fix the software that people already have, they won't want to buy the new version! And in defense of management choices, how many of us can say, if presented with a choice between the company surviving (and supporting the user base and the families of the employees, shareholders, etc.) and squashing a few bugs, what the "high road" would be? I observed the effects of this directly, in my teams. My "producers," that is, the managers in charge of each title, got bonuses for shipping the title on time. "On time" was more critical in those days when software was sold via physical media. It would be introduced at an important trade show and have to be on the shelves at the big stores the next day. What that meant, effectively, was that if I found a heinous crash bug 24 hours before we were supposed to go to manufacturing, sure, I'd be a studmuffin hero among the QA team, but up the chain the thanks would get less and less hearty. So I'd be the pariah for being good at my job. The better I was at my job, the more money I cost the company, because I switched the Coding Black Box over to fixing bugs. Who wants to cost a boss you like and are trying to please a $5000 bonus? Now here we are, with our case of Sonar. A venerable shrinkwrap program's company was dissolved and the program itself sold off. Some of the former staff were hired back to continue work on the code, and the program reissued under a different name and licensing scheme. The parent company has a diversified portfolio in the music field, including instruments and an online DAW/musical social media site. Cakewalk is positioned to continue as an updated version of Sonar, as well as function as an offline front end to the musical social media site. The company also has freeware DAW's for iOS and Android that function as front ends to the site. (everyone knows this, right? BandLab already had two freeware DAW's in the marketplace before they put out Cakewalk) What does this mean for the quality of the software going forward? For a single copy of Sonar, Cakewalk was paid hundreds of dollars, which went to pay programmers, QA engineers like I used to be, people to administer the beta program, artist relations, endorsements, power lunches with Microsoft insiders, etc. That was an incentive to put out a quality product. Nobody would buy it if it wasn't any good, right? Now anyone can download the whole thing, and BandLab gets diddly squat. Revenue is zero whether anyone downloads it or not. Where is the incentive to improve it or fix bugs or add features or do anything at all to it? There's no threat of failure if it stinks, no reward for success if it's great. There's neither carrot nor stick, so what makes the donkey do anything? Okay, remember our black box, "Coding?" It's smaller now, but more efficient. The new owners only hired back a small percentage of the old company's staff, and I suspect programming is done in home office(s). They don't have to throw as much money into the box because the infrastructure is shared, smaller, etc. Support is web only, no phones. There is no sales staff, etc. Fewer licensing fees to bundling partners. On and on, the costs that were once involved in making the old program are much reduced. The new company is diversified and has deeper pockets than the former owners. As freeware, the program no longer has to sit up and beg for new license fees. There are no license fees to beg for. That means we can do whatever we want with the black box! In my experience, programmers love being given the chance to go through their code and fix bugs. They tend to be picky and focused about their work in the first place, and who likes having something they made out there in the world with obvious flaws in it? It would be like a mix engineer shipping a track with a big plosive pop in the vocal and not being allowed to fix it and having to listen to it over and over. Noel and the other programmers may be exceptions to this, but probably not. This goes for optimizing as well. Just like us, they look at it and think "I could do that so much better if I could take another pass at it." Well, who's got the keys to the black box? And a loyal user base would usually rather have the smaller features they've been begging for for the the past 3 years than some new thing that only 5% of the people who use the software are going to touch. Case in point: those note values in the Piano Roll would not sell a new license or upgrade to anyone, but they are really nice to have, and it would be a pain not to have them. The interleave indicators are another. Rename Clip. Ripple Edit button. Export Module. Plug-in Manager. Fast VST scan. All these "little" things that when added up, make Cakewalk feel like a "deluxe" version of the program I downloaded in April 2018. But added up, could you even call it Cakewalk 2.0? So there you are, Andy, that is my essay on why I think you have nothing to worry about, only things to look forward to, with a freeware licensing model. It's not something that reduces resources, which therefore reduces quality, it's something that gives the people who produce the software more freedom to make the program better, with "better" meaning what most of us would like it to mean. Faster bug fixes, features added that tend toward the useful rather than the flashy, and integration with a forward-thinking online collaboration platform. Oh, also we don't have to pay any money for it.

For those who may have been bothered by the Ripple Edit button, and if you're a good theme junkie, have been bothered, the Ripple Edit button from Tungsten looks great as a replacement for the default "Mercury" one.