Starship Krupa

Check this out ?: Cakewalk SONAR keyboard Kinda outta your budget, but sort of "for the CbB user who has everything." For mousin' I used to use a Logitech Trackman Marble, but really wanted to have a scroll wheel, so I recently switched over to a standard Logitech wireless mouse. However, I just discovered a nice piece of freeware that will allow me to program one of the smaller buttons on the Marble to scroll with the ball, so I'm going to install that and try going back to it. I can really fly with the Trackman Marble. I just hope that the program will also simulate the left and right wheel action.

Never installed SONAR before CbB, so not possible. The way I noticed these was by opening up Plug-in Manager and looking to see which VST's were excluded. I enabled them and went "WHOA," Keanu style. I have the .DLL's and accompanying Resource directories backed up in case they, uh, get damaged or something. Right you are, they aren't officially there, if they were, I wouldn't have had to post this recipe for enabling them. It's a hidden, disabled feature. Use at your own risk.

That's the thing. This is my viewpoint: "horses for courses," and everything else is really a matter of personal preference. Track in CbB, mix in Mixbus, master in Pro Tools, whatever. I'm told that REAPER rules for live work due to all the routing options, and I don't doubt that at all. I have a best buddy of 30 years and his son staying at my place for the holidays, and his kid (22 y.o. college student) is in the midst of composing/assembling a dubstep piece using Ableton (never call it "Live," ?) his preferred platform. His dad, who used to own a studio in SF is a Pro Tools man through and through, his current rig is a Mac Pro tower with a couple of UAD cards in it. He considers anything else "hobby" grade, but has done some good work in my studio with Mixcraft and Cakewalk. I, of course, am a Mixcraft veteran who is now in the process of learning Cakewalk, which I consider a great-sounding DAW with great-sounding plug-ins and some quirks I'm getting used to. I like it better than the demos of other DAW's I tried a few years back. Dad is using my instruments to record a pop song, and jumped right in with Cakewalk, but would of course much rather be using PT. He was just going to record drum tracks, but the project snowballed, and he wound up staying up 'til dawn a couple of nights in a row and now has an almost finished mix with guitar, bass, and vocals. It sounds freaking killer and he took to CbB pretty easily. Unfortunately, I'm having troubles with my CbB installation because I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 a few days ago upon learning that BL were emphasizing 10 as the preferred platform. ? The playback engine keeps quitting, and it takes about 3 seconds to start when you hit the spacebar. Separate thread. Anyway, after looking over kid's shoulder and chatting with him, enjoying watching him work, watching his song come together, I am certain that each of us could do what the other does using our preferred DAW, but it would be clunkier and take longer. Trevor would probably flail using Ableton to record and comp 20 tracks of audio, including the simultaneous 4 tracks for the drum kit. I'm not sure Ableton can even do comping. Sample management and the handling of the built-in FX rack in PT and Cakewalk is nowhere near what it is in Ableton, and neither CbB nor PT have integrated phrase samplers, so Geoff and I would be like "eeble-beeble-beeble" first trying to learn how to use a 3rd-party phrase sampler (which I have already done due to Cakewalk not having its own). Trevor would have his dubstep piece circulating amongst the hot DJ's while Geoff was still trying to find a phrase sampler compatible with AAX, and it would probably cost a fortune. Even with the excellence of the FX that come with CbB and the ones I have acquired, I can't touch what Geoff has with his UAD cards and Ocean Way and Abbey Road whatevers and the way that he can freakin' fly over the keyboard doing comps due to his years using the Industry Standard DAW with its really slick management of lanes and takes. Neither of them can deny the fact that the cost-to-performance ratio of my home studio flattens EITHER of their setups. VST support is excellent and mature in CbB, and that gives me a cornucopia of other great inexpensive and freeware FX to choose from. PT is AAX only, which limits what PT users have access to. We've all seen LarryC's deals, it's like trying to drink from a firehose. The EDM synths I use, Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, cost me $1 each, at the same time snagging free licenses for iZotope Neutron Elements and Ozone Elements. Okay, so those all have AAX versions, but still, there are plenty I use that don't due to Avid charging (WTF?) developers to distribute in that format. Mr. Pro Tools/UAD thinks that the ProChannel with its console and tape and compressor emulations is hot schnit, BTW. Our direct access to Noel and Jon and Meng is amazing given how Digidesign and now Avid (who are somewhat better) treat Pro Tools users, and given the magnitude of really nasty bugs that have persisted over so many major revisions of Pro Tools. Geoff related how there was one known bug where the PT transport would just refuse to go into playback! And even the support people at Digi knew about it. It persisted across at least two MAJOR product releases. I've watched the current dev team beat the snot out of bugs in CbB. The progress is tangible. As a veteran of a couple of prominent software companies, this really matters to me. If I were on a platform that was getting whiz-bang features while bugs like that persisted, it would bring me down. I'm also fascinated by BandLab's vision for integrating CbB with their collaborative platform. It's cool to be around for that. We all have our reasons for liking and using this DAW or that DAW. It's probably more to be celebrated that we have so much choice than to be argued over, but it's in our nature to argue over it. Fords suck and Chevys rule or vice versa, when they are both excellent American automobiles. Or Mercedes suck and Ferrari rule when they are both excellent European Formula One racing teams. A baseball pitcher is evil incarnate when he is playing for the Dodgers, but a hero after he is traded to the Giants. I only WISH CbB had Pro Tools slick handling of takes and lanes and Ableton's handling of phrase samples and FX rack. Oh, also the playback engine that doesn't fall down on my 'puter. ?

Rest assured, there are trollslayers standing by.

So is there no way to record in the way I describe? I want to be in Loop mode, but be able to abort a take due to trainwreckage, restart my tracking, but not have my subsequent takes chopped up into clips that match up with the aborted takes. If not, my choices are to either abort and then delete the resulting clips, or wait out the loop, maybe practice while the song's playing, and let the song start over? It seems that there are others who are having workflow issues with Loop mode recording in Comping mode. I guess I do that, too, sometimes I want to stop the transport to take a break, have a drink of water when singing or something and wind up with a clip that doesn't fill up the entire loop and then subsequent takes get the choppy treatment. I thought there must be a way to turn it off or configure it so that this didn't happen, but that's a feature request waiting to happen.

Can you bump mine up? My posts, while fewer, were high in quality, so I think my post count should reflect that. In the interest of fairness (a term that I think was mentioned once or twice when the licensing model was changed) I think there should be a formula, because people who were there longer have an unfair advantage toward getting a higher post count. So how about there be a formula where we average it over a number of years? Or take the entire number of posts from the old forum and divide them equally among the people who had accounts over there, because it really was collective wisdom. I'd be in favor of giving LarryC more, because that guy was great about finding all those deals on plug-ins and I want to encourage him.

I have a problem that happens all the time, and I'm sure it's preventable with the right configuration settings. I tend to record a lot of my stuff as a solo performer, recording in Loop mode, doing 3 or 4 takes and then selecting the best take or comping. I have my Project/Record settings set to Comping, with Store Takes in a Single Track, Create New Lanes On Overlap, and New Takes on Top. Now as we all do, I sometimes abort takes shortly after the start due to early flubs, or not feelin' it, or whatever. This leaves a stub clip in the take lane(s) of whatever track(s) I'm recording. That's fine until I hit W to top it and R to start recording again, at which point I'll get a new take lane and a clip, but for some reason having that other stub sitting there is a sign to Cakewalk telling it that I want it to split my new takes right at the edge of that clip. I can't describe exactly what it does because the logic of it is impenetrable to me, all I know is that if I abort a take, I better get any stub clips the heck out of there before doing any more recording or Cakewalk will think that I want the new ones split into clips to match. And heaven forbid one of the takes should continue past the loop point and then past the stub clip, it gets even weirder if I do that. So: what I want Cakewalk to do is when I am tracking, and it's recording and making a new clip in a new take lane, I want it to ignore the fact that there is a clip in the lane next to it. I want it to forget about past mistakes and just move on. Even though Bob Ross tells us that everyone needs a friend, the leftover clip from my earlier botched take does not need a friend, it just needs to be deleted when I am done drumming or singing or whatever and sit down at the computer. There are other situations where I've been recording audio and then stopped and the resulting clips seemed like they were arbitrarily split and flung across multiple take lanes. I'm sure this feature makes sense somehow, in some context, but I would rather just turn it off or configure things correctly if that's possible for now. I've checked the documentation and can't quite figure it out. There is this one part that confuses me: "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." Does that mean that even if I already have Create New Lane On Overlap selected in Preferences, I also have to have the buttons pushed that show the Take Lanes on each channel I'm tracking or it won't work? And is doing that even the answer to my troubles?

If only people who ask to have their post counts brought over will have it done, I'd like to politely suggest that the connotations of doing it may not be 100% positive. After all, why do you want everyone else to see how many messages you wrote on another forum? Do you want people to think that what you write carries more weight? Do you think you deserve more respect because of it? If it's not a status symbol, then why do you want it there? If it is a status symbol, are you prepared for the reactions of people who see it and know right away that you asked to have a status symbol put under your handle? If everyone were going to have their counts brought over, fine, but no way am I asking (mine was only in the hundreds anyway, but still).

Thanks! I think it's good to laugh about this stuff that people take so seriously. It's kind of odd the way people can be, but I guess it's a tendency we all have. These forums are communities, and what the community has formed around is this software that we enjoy using. Someone saying that it's not perfect can't help but seem like an attack to be defended against. Just look at me on the old forum with my baiting of people who wanted to stick with SONAR long after CbB was (in my eyes) thoroughly vetted. It applies to me. I'll cop to that. And with notation software, there might be snobbery about people not having music education but wanting to create notation.

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!)