Starship Krupa

Hey, I sympathize. Just saying that iZotope acquired an unfortunate situation as far as how the product line was set up. The line should have already been down to just 4 reverbs. I too have a couple of Excalibur licenses kicking around although I no longer even bother to install it. I only picked it up because $9.99 and Phoenix knocked me out so hard I figured it had to have something going for it. Turns out it just never made the rotation. As you point out, the Exponential abandonment should be less of an issue on Windows. Mac users are used to being treated as money-filled piñatas, hung by their feet and beaten until the cash falls from their pockets. At least MTurboReverble finally managed to equal the Expos in quality (IMO).

They didn't abandon them, they consolidated them. Except for that multi-fx one whose name I can't even remember. Stratus and Symphony and their 3D counterparts have been updated to run on Apple's new processors and are still being sold. Phoenix, Nimbus and Stratus could have been called Phoenix, Phoenix 2, and Phoenix 3. Or even 1.1 and 1.2, the newer features really weren't all that. The presets from each previous one work in the later ones. Same with R1, R2 and Symphony. That was the Exponential guy's doing, for whatever reason he decided that each revision should have a whole new product name. He did seem to be into wringing as much money as possible out of the products, Stratus and Symphony are STILL single-seat licenses. iZotope at least put them in the iLok Cloud so you can use them on multiple systems, just not at the same time. iZotope probably decided that there was no reason other than price to maintain 12 products instead of 4. There was some outcry about old project compatibility for Phoenix and the rest, but If Phoenix and R1 stop working for whatever reason and people still have unfinished projects that include them, they can export presets and use them in the newer versions. Sux for Mac users, but if anyone's used to forced upgrades, it's Mac users.🙄

Given the amount of system resources UAD's VCA Compressor eats up on my system, I can do without their products. These days, plug-ins should not jump in resource usage when you open their UI. Especially ones that have no dynamic display other than a moving needle. We have OpenGL, we have DirectX. Use them. Has me wondering whether all those years of being able to offload the processing to their coprocessors made them lazy as far as resource usage. It looks as if they decided that personal computers now have enough CPU cores and RAM to do what once required a dedicated IC. I was skeptical about those UAD coprocessors until about 5 years ago, when I got a chance to compare brainworx' native plug-ins to the UAD-aware ones. The UAD-aware ones sounded better. Likely due to being able to do more with those coprocessors.

I already have all of the Exponentials and Neoverb, so I'll wait a couple of years for the $9.99 sales. What it does can probably be approximated with pre and/or post EQ on a reverb send. Some reverbs (like the Exponentials and MeldaProduction's) have EQ built in. It looks like what they've done here is built in Trackspacer or MSpectralDynamics-style adaptive collision control. Notice how the demo shows a common EQ "smile." Carving EQ in reverb returns dates back at least as far as George Martin at Abbey Road. What they've done is a clever, iZotope-y take on it. If I want what it does, I can twist up something in MXXX. Might be a fun challenge.

I think it's already been figured out, but I'll chime in as a user of LEVELS. You can definitely check for everything that LEVELS does using just what comes with the MFreeFX bundle, with MAnalyzer and MLoudnessAnalyzer. As for the Bass Space feature, they make it sound fancier than it is. If you can interpret what SPAN or MAnalyzer, or even just the spectrum analyzer in Sonar's built-in EQ, you have everything that Bass Space does. The genius of LEVELS is that they took half a dozen common analysis tasks and put them in an easy-to-read display. There's a big round meter-y space in the middle, then the various tasks are arranged around the outside like numerals on a clock face. That's why it's the last thing in the chain in every single one of my templates. I think I got version 1 in some freebie deal or other, then paid to upgrade it when version 2 came around. Good marketing on their part because being a frugal guy, I would never have paid for such a tool. I already had its functions covered. But once I was exposed to its handiness, I was hooked. Truth, though, Bass Space isn't something in my critical path. Along the mixing way I already have EQ's with spectrum analyzers that show me when tracks have needless energy down there, and at this point, checking to see what can benefit from highpassing is muscle memory. I mostly use LEVELS to check for peak and LUFS, and stereo image. The widgets around the clock face turn red if it thinks there's something that needs attention, so I check those and decide if it's right about that. It kind of reminds me of RC-20. Before I got RC-20, I had multiple free plug-ins that could do everything that RC-20 does. There's nothing at all special about vinyl crackle, noise, wow and flutter, bit reduction, etc. The mighty FreeFX and Kilohearts Essentials bundles have it covered. But the designers of RC-20 probably worked backward starting with the task at hand, which is making clean samples sound like they come from thrift store vinyl or by holding a cheap mic up to an old TV speaker. So it takes 1/4 the time for RC-20 to do what I'd do with the other plug-ins, and most importantly, it doesn't derail my ADHD brain. I stay in the flow rather than going down garden paths with 3 or 4 plug-ins. Mastering the Mix are good at that, too. So they probably thought about what the most-needed metering tasks are and whittled it down and made a cool front-facing UI. Same reason I reach for EXPOSE to analyze final mixes despite the fact that I have MMultiAnalyzer, MCompare, Ozone Advanced, and Master Match.

Especially with that "customers who previously purchased the plug-in at its old price will be refunded" clause, I'd say they did not. If they had said "both customers who previously purchased the plug-in at its old price will be refunded" it wouldn't have surprised me. I mean, what were they trying to sell it for? $200? Or was it more? "Hello, this is the plug-in market, we're calling to inform you that everyone who wants a vintage Fairchild 670 emulation already has at least one, and they paid less for it than this. IK Multimedia even gave out free licenses for their highly-regarded one a few years ago. PreSonus bundles one with their DAW. If you had come out with this product in 2009 you may have had some takers at that price. It is not 2009. Many DAW users were not even born in 2009. Goodbye and have a great day."

I was surprised by the reasonableness of the price. I'm sure it uses those sweet, sweet Exponential algorithms, so it should be a great-sounding 'verb.

May be a few other tips I could share around this topic.... Cakewalk demands many Deselect All commands in order to allow us to create without negative consequences, so what I do on all of my DAW systems is bind "Select None" to the "~/`" key in the upper left corner of most Windows keyboards beneath the Esc key. It's great because it's one of the few single keys that's not bound by default. Do you know about engaging Scroll Lock to stop automatic scrolling?

For what it does, I've seen nothing that can beat it.

Replace the synths with guitar and it would sound even more like The Cure. As a fan of Mr. Smith's guitar playing, I miss that on this song.

Thanks for the clarification. Wow, so Microsoft's redist installers themselves don't have the smarts to check for a newer version? I still think that app installers that will cause this scenario should be flagged as malware. I suspect that if that were the case, those companies that haven't gotten the memo would get their necessary learning experience.😁

Because what I am doing now works flawlessly, with fewer clicks.

Nor do I in most cases. In my case, I switch back and forth between my PreSonus Studio 2|4 and the Realtek, and it saves a bit of time/hassle to leave everything on ASIO. Cakewalk isn't my only DAW, and I have bit perfect music players that use ASIO and create even more hassle when switching driver modes. If I didn't have a nice external audio interface to plug in, it would be WASAPI all the time.

Similar then to the wrapper that I use when I need a wrapper, ASIO2WASAPI. The scenario for my use of ASIO2WASAPI on my laptop is that the bit perfect audio players that I prefer, and Cakewalk itself, make you go through an extra layer of rigmarole if you change driver models from ASIO to WASAPI. Sonar always wants to run its profiler query to enumerate bit rates and such, and my music player wants an entire restart. If I just keep the driver mode on ASIO and use ASIO2WASAPI when I'm listening through the onboard CODEC, these programs don't do that extra stuff. So I can plug my Studio 2|4 in when I want to do recording or MIDI and if I unplug it and take the laptop on a plane, I don't have to go through the driver model dance. This is a work laptop? Initially configured by your IT department or someone at Dell or HP or Lenovo or Acer I guess. The only times I've been unable to use WASAPI Exclusive were when either the "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device" box wasn't checked in Control Panel/Sound (see below), or when it was checked, but some hidden app had control of the driver. The junkier, more "shovelware" an app is (like the stuff routinely cluttering brand new laptops), it seems like the more likely it is to want to take control of something or other and leave itself running. In my own subjective experience, the ubiquitous Realtek CODEC is not that bad in and of itself. I've read the spec sheet. S/N, THD, IMD and slew rate and so forth are respectable. They can even operate at the very high sample rates. The Realtek CODEC is helped a little by not having responsibility for such things as managing USB traffic and creating a 48V rail (which requires a bus-powered USB interface to turn 5V into clean 48V). It IS, however, at the mercy of physical PCB/jack routing, and it wouldn't surprise me if it produces better results (jitter-wise) when it sees cleaner DC.

Sorry for participating in the hijack, but there is SO much misinformation flying around about ASIO4ALL, especially since Cakewalk started throwing that message about it. I've seen multiple posts where someone was convinced that Cakewalk doesn't work with ASIO because they saw that message. Cakewalk obviously DOES work with ASIO, and as @pwalpwal pointed out, it usually even works fine with ASIO4ALL. But these days, there is no need for ASIO4ALL whatsoever. If you're on a laptop using the Realtek chip with Cakewalk/Sonar, go with WASAPI. If you're using a program that doesn't support WASAPI (like Ableton Live!), use ASIO2WASAPI. That's it, that's all you need. To be clear, Cakewalk are not the ones responsible for the removal of those synths. Roland controlled TTS-1 and finally told Cakewalk to stop distributing it. As for MS Wavetable, it was deprecated by Microsoft.

ASIOALL is becoming synonymous with "misinformation." For use with Cakewalk software, there is no reason whatsoever to use ASIO4ALL, simply because Cakewalk's products work great with WASAPI, which offers at least the same low latency performance as ASIO4ALL. It can do even better if you use WASAPI Exclusive. I don't know what the full text of Cakewalk's warning message about ASIO4ALL is, but it would be good if it mentioned that what you should use if you don't have a vendor-supplied ASIO driver is WASAPI. For other audio software that supports ASIO but not WASAPI, such as Ableton Live! and some older MAGIX products, a better solution is ASIO2WASAPI. It is freeware, regardless of whether Google shows results for it. Even if you use ASIO4ALL with Cakewalk/Sonar/Next because you read that ASIO is better than WASAPI and you don't grasp that the writer meant that a native ASIO driver (as supplied by your interface's vendor) is better than WASAPI, ASIO2WASAPI is still a better solution than ASIO4ALL. Cakewalk/Sonar won't complain about it and you'll get the same good performance and sound quality of WASAPI while still "using ASIO because it's better than WASAPI." I know that there are people who contend that WASAPI doesn't work on their system and ASIO4ALL does, but WASAPI is specifically designed to work on any Windows version newer than Vista with any Realtek chip. Also the "Intel HD audio" chip that some Intel chipset motherboards came with. If WASAPI doesn't work with your onboard sound CODEC, then something is misconfigured either on your motherboard or in Windows.

Not only that, but notice that it popped up on a Friday, so they probably figure that they'll get 48 hours of larceny before being shut down. I see that they also claim to resell MeldaProduction and A|A|S products at steep discounts. As a loyal customer of both, I think they should be informed that their newest dealer's promotion is reaching a wide audience. I'm sure they'll be excited to know.

The "unfair" seems to refer to the price tags on these products?

Was it that there were bigger a55holes than his dad in rock music? (it's okay for me to speak ill of dead people because I'm going to be one myself)

Yeah....the price is just too close to the $49 ST 4 MAX price. So unless somehow you are missing exactly the instruments in the HB deal you get way, way more for your money by just getting ST 4 MAX. And you may be able to use JamPoints or JRRShop to knock that down a little further. Big fan of $49 ST 4 MAX here, I got it last year and am still discovering useful sounds. Miroslav 2 may not be the absolute best orchestral library out there, but it's great for seasoning pop songs and is a fraction of the cost of just about anything else. For me, SampleTron 2 was the hidden treasure, and Syntronik 2 makes it so that I don't long for any vintage synths.

Did you: The idea I'm getting is that just uninstalling DaVinci Resolve won't set things right. That will just leave you without Resolve and no Sonar either, because it doesn't address the problem of the Microsoft redistributables needing to be the latest. Follow the link, update the redistributables, and see what happens. Installers that just go ahead and overwrite the MS redistributables without checking to see if a newer version is already installed should be categorized as malware for all the damage they do.

I had the privilege to see them live in Oakland back in 2000. Transcendent. Vintage drum pr0n: sweet Rogers kit.

I really have to go with "the art, not the artist" when appreciating Oasis. I think What's the Story is a masterpiece of songcraft. De gustibus.

It would be helpful if you would tell us what model of interface, speakers, and headphones you are using.