Starship Krupa

I too think it would be a mistake to keep Sonar and Next subscription-only. I'm hoping that they're just testing the waters and/or deciding how to implement a perpetual license. Count me as disappointed. I hope we don't have to wait for a Waves-style backlash. So many people swore off Waves forever during that debacle. Also, the only other DAW on the market (to the extent that it's even on the market) that's subscription-only is Audition. Does anyone who didn't get it as part of their Adobe subscription use it? Does anyone subscribe primarily to get Audition (yippee, not only do I get my favorite DAW, but I get these cool photo and video editors!)? I wonder how well they're doing with the subscriptions.

Hmm. Kazrog blames Cakewalk, says Cakewalk don't support newer VST3 spec? Seems unlikely, Cakewalk are proud of their strong support for the VST spec. You try to contact Cakewalk support? What do they say? Cakewalk engineers need to learn of this issue. Kazrog should have dropped them some email if they thought it was Cakewalk's fault.

I found out about the SPL Vitalizer because a guy posted a song on this forum. I don't remember his name, but I remember that his singing voice reminded me of Eddy Grant. His mix was really well done and pro sounding and it had this ear candy sparkle to it that impressed me so I asked him about it. He said that it was probably his use of the Vitalizer, so I downloaded the demo and tried it and then waited for the next "our plug-ins for next to nothing" sale from PA. I'm generally skeptical about exciters. Some of these online automated mastering services might be using that kind of processing to put on some "shine." It usually sounds better to me when my ears are kinda fatigued, but then unnatural when I'm relaxed and listening more closely. I've also had it jump out when doing test listens on lower-fidelity playback systems. You guys, very experienced listeners, initially thought the Mixea version sounded better, but your opinion changed after further listens. That's similar to my experience with over-applied exciters. The Vitalizer might be doing something like that, too (the manual is vague enough to suggest it), but at least if you do it yourself, you can control the amount and not overcook it.

Look up the album on Wikipedia and Ms. Goschen is there in her birthday top. The other 6th grade girls must have hated her.

Kidding aside, it seems like a good opportunity to clap on a set of headphones and fire up Metric AB and listen hard to what sounds better to you about the Mixea'd track. There is no way on this green Earth that you don't have the tools, the question is which ones and how to apply it/them. The first time I tried running one of my mixes through Ozone Elements (both the presets and the Assistant) was a sobering experience. Remembering the legend of John Henry, I scraped my ego off the floor and got busy with the other tools I had available and worked until I could equal what Ozone was doing, and then I worked some more until I got something I liked better than Ozone. You said "clarity." Try patching this in: https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/spl_vitalizer_mk2-t.html

Sounds like your budget is higher than mine, but I just bought one of these Blue Baby Bottles on sale at Amazon for $164: https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Creators-Microphone-Recording-Streaming/dp/B01N7TTXZ5 I'm not much of a mic maven, but years ago a studio owner friend of mine used one of these to record me and it sounded great.

Hmmm. Must figure out what the magic pixie dust is there. If the guy with the most audio processing software of anyone I know is impressed, it must be pretty impressive.

Odd duplicate post....this space was intentionally left blank.

Yeah, that was the intention when I started those 5 years ago. The rules/suggestion are that these are 64-bit plug-ins that people have tried and are known to work with Cakewalk. There's a LOT of good stuff in those topics, so go check 'em out if you haven't. And bump them if you can. I've never been able to get TPTB to sticky them. I understand why that might be, they may not want it to seem like these products are endorsed by them in any way. It's an indicator of the cultural firewall between the Coffee House part of the forum and the Cakewalk part that there are so many users of each that don't know what's going on in one or the other. There's plenty of stuff in those threads that I don't think has ever been posted in Deals because they weren't news, rather stuff that had been around for a long time, like the Dead Duck stuff. They also have some historical value in showing how the freeware world has changed in the past 5 years. The starting principle, that it was possible to put together a studio using only free software, is probably something that 5 years on, nobody would even question. I counted, and just between the two FX bundles that I recommend everyone install regardless of what else they have on their system, Kilohearts Essentials and MeldaProduction FreeFX, there are over 70 top quality plug-ins. The ratio of small freeware-only developers to industry leaders giving away loss leaders has also changed. These days you could say that it's possible to make it happen using only major companies' free loss leaders. Also there's been the phenomenon of middle-sized developers closing shop and releasing their entire line for free and/or releasing older versions for free (you can pick up some very nice ToneBoosters plug-ins this way).

I also still have my copy of that. The later controversy around it came as a surprise to me because when I was a teenager the model looked to me like a young adult woman who happened to have small ones. She always looked to me like an 18 year old rocker chick 'cause she also looks kinda stoned. She's 11 in the photo, definitely an early bloomer.

Maybe it's for Detroit Techno....

Gee, Peter. A comment like that could also be taken as "you don't need it because your recordings already sound fantastic." Remember how I did that with your assertions that you have a crappy singing voice? I would love to have a voice with that character. I think my singing voice is kinda bland by comparison.

The limiters in my kit include Unlimited (a really good freeware one), the ones in Ozone, and Boost11. Sometimes I use an all-in-one on the master bus, like T-Racks One or bx_masterdesk. For simple safety limiting, I put an instance of Kilohearts Limiter on every softsynth track, set to clamp at -3dB. A limiter can be a pretty simple thing, it's a compressor with the ratio cranked over 20%, so if all you want from it is limiting, MCompressor and any number of other compressors can do limiting. We usually want some fanciness, though, in our bus limiters. Here's are screenshots of one of the MDynamics limiter "devices" or "easy screens," both with the faceplate and without: I also popped open the multiparameter panel. With devices/easy screens, the knobs on the faceplate are connected to multiparameters. Multiparameters is their term for taking multiple different plug-in parameters and tying them together so that you can adjust them with a single control. There are also modulators, which allow you to modulate any parameter, such as with a waveform (LFO) or envelope follower (to set up things like autowahs). Someday I'd like to learn enough to make my own easy screens. Aside from the 3 limiter devices, there are a couple of limiter presets from before there were devices. When I first started taking notice of MeldaProduction, Vojtech was more outspoken and idiosyncratic, more steadfast in his views. There didn't need to be any MLimiters because what a limiter does is so close to what a compressor does that all you need is to make an MDynamics that is versatile enough to do anything you could possibly want to do in regard to dynamics. He was very down on "vintage mojo" and while I sometimes want some of that, like with my beloved T-Racks 670 (a compressor that's modeled on a device that was called a "limiter" by its manufacturer), I agreed with him in principle, that there was no reason to be constrained by the limitations of decades ago. In his philosophy at the time, if you wanted some analog "mojo," that mojo comes down to non-linear frequency response and added noise and there's no need to build that into a software compressor. If you want to fiddle with your frequency response, use a little EQ, if you want floor noise, use a noise generator. Both of which you can have for free in the bundle. He's since either mellowed on that or at least conceded that not everyone understands things as well as he does with his likely genius IQ and engineering education. Sure, you can make a credible LA/2A using MCompressor and MEQualizer, but who knows where to begin? And why would you want to, when IK or Waves will sell you a pre-rolled solution for $30 that you can just throw on your tracks and get the sound of an LA/2A without having to reverse engineer it yourself? Who cares if MDynamics can be used to emulate any dynamic processor if very few people are actually savvy enough to do it? That's why I have two different categories for dynamics processors and EQ's. There's the precision ones (MeldaProduction, Kilohearts, FabFilter, iZotope) and the character ones. I prefer Melda for the precision stuff and T-Racks and brainworx for the character stuff. Of course there's plenty of overlap, Melda now have their "vintage modeled" processors like MTurboEQ and MTurboComp, and IK have paragraphic EQ's and compressors that don't try to emulate anything, but I tend to like IK's character ones better and Melda's precision ones better. Here's a strong suggestion about MeldaProduction plug-ins: since they make it easy enough, pop open the toolbar that most of them have on the right hand side and flip it between L+R and M+S, try it sometime. Especially with ones that affect dynamics, like compressors and limiters, but it also can apply to others as well. If you haven't tried this, do it and listen to what happens to your stereo image. M/S dynamics manipulation is one of my favorite mixing tricks, mostly because as a listener, I love ear candy like that myself, especially with electronic pieces. Oddly, it wasn't a MeldaProduction product but a T-Racks product that first turned me on to it, turns out that their 670 has a couple of presets that take advantage of the M/S capability and I tried one and was immediately sold on it.

I do I do! I put it in my mastering chain, usually switched into M/S mode. It's my go-to mastering limiter.

I did as you said and it updated my Melodyne 5, but I don't know what "Michigan" updates are.

I love love love Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. This began with the US premiere of Princess Mononoke, which an anime fan friend of mine got me to see at Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. I was immediately hooked. It was Princess Mononoke getting a US release on DVD that was my trigger for buying a DVD player. The anime love stuck, too. I had been a fan of Japanese cartoons as a child, Wonder/Amazing Three, Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Gigantor. Princess Mononoke reminded me of how great those were, how much more complex and nuanced the stories were compared to American animated shows. Since then I've watched as much as I can get hold of. Particularly a fan of Neon Genesis: Evangelion. When you said "everything they do is classy," I did wonder if you include Pom Poko, which I haven't yet seen, but which reportedly features body humor in the form of mythical heroic raccoon dogs who parasail using their nutsacks. Some things just don't translate well, I guess. I love Hisaishi's scores, but find his choice of instruments in the earlier stuff....wanting? It sounds like he used a Roland Sound Canvas while writing it, then instead of giving it to an orchestra, shipped the Sound Canvas recordings. Very "General MIDI" sounding. I was happy when he ditched that approach. Have you seen my Cakewalk theme that was inspired by Neon Genesis: Evangelion?

You can get a pretty good idea of what it's capable of due to there being over 100 Chromaphone sounds in Swatches. Of course the trial is the way to go to find out whether you like the programming. Speaking of programming, synth programming is something that has almost entirely eluded me over the decades, starting 25 years ago with the purchase of my Yamaha CS6X and up through today, with the collection of virtual instruments both relatively simple and hideously complex. To me it remains as opaque as trying to use a Glitchmachines processor. As in, I can twiddle knobs and make it sound different, but I am unable to start with a sound in my head and then use one of my synths to get it except by browsing its presets. Fortunately, I have enough synths that browsing all their presets would take days, so as long as I can remember what each of the instruments sounds like in general, I can find something. And speaking of CM-101, I remember that one! I installed it and worked my way through the tutorials and....yeah, oh well. Sometimes I just have to accept that there are things that I may never get good at and move on.

I wouldn't put DC-106 in there with the other ones you mentioned. Somewhere between the top tier and stuff like Union and Imperfect. I think it sounds great, really good basses. It's a matter of personal taste and perception. A|A|S have a fancy aura to me. That modeling engine of theirs is amazing. They must use the same basic engine for most of their synths, at least the ones that they sell soundpacks for. Their player will play any of them. Objec Delay is a fine, fine processor, too. The ones that I think are real sleepers are Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, especially the former. Very light on the CPU and sound great.

The price of entry to audio recording goes ever lower: https://www.amazon.com/Mackie-Interface-Onyx-Artist-1-2/dp/B07664LMPQ/

ASIO4ALL is for people who don't know about ASIO2WASAPI.?

I consider them to be an elite company. Chromaphone is a poll-topping synth. Thanks for the Humble Bundle link. Gonna haveta see if there are enough soundpacks I don't already have to justify the $20. I know I don't have Caffeine, Urban Trip, and Hop Riffs.

Cakewalk comes with a pretty decent sounding amp sim, and there are tons of freebies out there, including free versions from IK Multimedia and Native Instruments. Plugin Alliance has a free version of its bx_rockrack. So try out as many different amp sims as you wish, get a feel for whether you like them or not. As far as soft synths, there are multiple free ones out there, and I heartily second the suggestion to try Cherry Audio's Voltage Modular. A|A|S' Swatches will give you a good idea of whether you like their thing (I do), and in and of itself has 700 fully-usable synth patches. Oddly, considering that I have licenses for multiple top quality amp sims, Voxengo's free Boogex is the first one I reach for when I want one (although it's not always the one I end up using). There are a couple of topics on free fx and instruments:

Cakewalk Inc. ceased to exist almost 7 years ago. None of its products is supported any more. BandLab now uses the old company name to market some current products, Cakewalk, Cakewalk Next, and Cakewalk Sonar, but they are BandLab products, supported by BandLab. However, there may be other users of Dimension Pro and Rapture on this forum who can try to help. Good luck.

I've not had the Realtek ASIO driver cause trouble just by being installed, as long as I don't try to use it in Cakewalk. Unfortunately I can't read the story that Latency Monitor is telling because I can't see the screen clip Cobus posted. They've got plenty to chew on with all the info I posted anyway. Those Dells are battlecruisers compared to any computer I've ever owned. On my i7-6950X system, Sonar's Performance Monitor shows one tiny blip every now and then.

IMO, the best reference tracks are the ones that I think sound the best. Unless you're doing the near-impossible these days, which is inventing a whole new genre, there must be commercial tracks out there that sound good to you. My favorite ways to acquire music these days are Bandcamp and CD. This is because I can rip CD's to FLAC, and Bandcamp allows download in FLAC format. Gotta have my lossless. Personal product recommendations: I use MCompare to referencing, which you can get right now for about $13 if you sign up for MeldaProduction's newsletter and use a referral code (PM me if you want one, we're not allowed to post them publicly). If you go this route, for an extra $5 or you can also buy the "pro" upgrade for the MFreeFX bundle in the same purchase. 37 very useful plug-ins, not only FX but analysis and other utilities. You can use MAnalyzer to compare your overall tonal balance with commercial releases. Also fully-functional in the free versions, but the upgrade unlocks some nice (but not essential) features. The sale is only on for another 5 days, but you can download and try MCompare for free if you want to see if it's worth the $13. Just do it quickly if you're interested.