Starship Krupa

Dang, you attracted some heavy hitters to this topic. Mark is a Cakewalk developer and Craig needs no introduction. It does sound like there might be some driver or other messing things up. Your system is a generation or three further along than mine, and I'm not seeing any performance issues. If you look in Mark's sig, he is a Cakewalk developer and his daily driver studio PC is an i7-3770. So the specs of your system are not the issue at all. You have plenty of horsepower for anything. nVidia's products seem to be the choice for DAW work, so likely no problem there. Yes, do as Craig says and disable the nVidia HD audio driver in Device Manager. Steinberg's audio interfaces and drivers are also excellent. The Cakewalk audio engine is the baby of the head developer, and he has given it many tweaks to increase the performance. The difference between what it was 6 years ago and now is stunning. I can't remember the last time the audio engine stopped for me. And buffer underruns seem to be mostly down to what plug-ins I have loaded up. So how to find what's bogging it down? The favorite tool for doing this is LatencyMon. You run it for a period of time (I usually just do a few minutes) and it will tell you what processes are having the biggest impact on latency performance. Then once you've found what process it is, or are, you can go from there. Years ago I was having glitching issues and it turned out to be my network card driver. I had gone to Intel's web site and downloaded the very latest driver, and it turned out that the (older) Dell driver worked much better. No doubt when you were searching, you came across various recommendations about BIOS settings and power plans, those are good to investigate as well. Pete Brown, Microsoft developer and Cakewalk user, has an excellent guide for tuning Windows for DAW use. As for the future, I've tried the Sonar beta, and saw no difference in performance whatsoever. Chances are by the time of release performance will have gotten even better. That's usually the way it goes for betas vs. releases. The biggest difference is that the UI looks slicker and more contemporary.

Wow, there have been some amazing additions to the line since then. No wonder you're happy with the purchase. The MComplete license is, as far as I know, unparalleled in the software industry. I can't think of any other company that offers a single fee for every product of its type that the company will ever produce. Maybe Image Line, with the FL Studio license, but I'm not sure if the FL Studio Pro license covers everything in their line. Of course, Image Line owns a piece of MeldaProduction, so they are on board with that lifetime license. FL Studio is said to be the most-used DAW in the world right now, so that licensing policy must work pretty well at attracting users. It's so counter to the current industry trend toward maintaining cash flow via subscriptions (a la Pro Tools and Adobe's entire pro line), paid upgrade plans (a la Waves), and grubbing for upgrade licenses (a la most of the rest of the companies). I don't begrudge the upgrade licenses, people can choose whether they are interested in new features. Where I draw the line is bug fixes. If a product is found to be defective in some way, the company should give me whatever bug fix releases come out at no extra cost. Anyway, about FabFilter, that FabFilter EQ is widely praised, but I have no experience with it, so I can't speak directly about it. It's said to be both aesthetically pleasing and straightforward to use. I'll hand it the crown just based on reviews and user descriptions. If I had unlimited funds for buying music software, I'd certainly take it for a test run. MeldaProduction's products are, in contrast, not for everyone. Since I'm okay with tweaking colors and trying out different skins, I've gotten the look of them to be pleasing to the eye. They've started addressing the issue by creating "devices" within many plug-ins that offer simplified, more conventional task-specific UI's. If you prefer the spartan UI, you can switch them off. And what mettelus says about the sparse documentation on the advanced features is true. I'll describe it as owning a car that can fly and float on water. The car is excellent at driving on the road, no problem there, but the owner's manual doesn't much describe how to access the flying and floating features. And when you ask the builder, he says he's not in the business of giving flying lessons. Every company has guiding philosophies. Not all of them try to create ecosystems. Plugin Alliance is a company that doesn't, they create individual task-specific plug-ins that are often emulations of classic hardware. Although they do have a subscription plan, the plug-ins are designed for individual purchase, and their UI's have little in common with each other.

Not driver development, that's for sure. I installed the latest Realtek driver on my notebook and it wouldn't correctly switch between the internal speakers and headphones when I'd plug them in. Had to roll the driver back, do some fiddling, now I have it where I can manually choose between them, still no automatic switching like it's supposed to be. As for the hardware CODECs themselves, they seem to be pretty good, and they pretty much have a monopoly in the PC motherboard market.

If you're comparing oranges to oranges, that is, an EQ or compressor made by FabFilter vs. ones made by iZotope, then it won't be a question of which one sounds "better," it'll be more a question of which one allows the user to do the job quickly and with a good understanding of what it's doing. As for comparing their "everything" packages, well, iZotope makes a lot of stuff that has no equivalent in the FabFilter line, like RX and Stutter Edit. iZotope's (excellent sounding) processors mostly come bundled with other processors to make up suites like Ozone, oriented toward mastering, Neutron, oriented toward mixing, Nectar, oriented toward vocal processing, RX, oriented toward dialog cleanup and similar tasks. To my knowledge, you can't buy a license for just a compressor from iZotope. You'll get your compressor, but it will come as part of Ozone or Neutron or Nectar. That, to me, is the big difference. I understand the appeal of both approaches. I have a license for iZotope's Music Production Suite that includes the latest versions of their stuff including Neutron, Ozone, Nectar and RX. I have no FabFilter, but I do have a license for MeldaProduction's MComplete bundle. Melda's approach is more like FabFilter's, where each plug-in stands alone, except for the one plug-in they have that allows you to use any of their other ones as a module. The difference I see is that iZotope wants to help you get industry-standard results quick with the help of automatic analysis. FabFilter wants to sell you top notch tools that you can use in any way you wish. No guidance, results dependent on your skill level, ears, and taste. At my house, MeldaProduction gets used way more often, hands down. I usually have an ideal sound in mind to start with, and I know how to set up processors to (I hope) get that sound. Most of the time. Sometimes I struggle to get the sound that I'm hearing in my mind. iZotope's suites are....like having another mix engineer around whose work I can compare with mine, look over their shoulder, see how they do it.

I remain puzzled as to why nobody has yet come up with a real ASIO driver for Realtek's CODEC. Realtek tried shipping one for a while, but it doesn't work. I know that the FOSS crew don't care for ASIO because it doesn't comply with FOSS licensing, but still....

Better to start your own thread in Feedback Loop than to resurrect this one. You'll get more and better attention.

Or you don't feel like spending an extra $50 (the price of entry, based on M-Audio's cheapest interface) and lugging around an extra piece of hardware just so you can compose and mix while traveling or perched in a coffee house. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Realtek hardware CODEC, I've actually read their datasheets, etc. For ITB work WASAPI Exclusive-on-Realtek will get you there just fine. I've seen EDM artists gigging live with audio coming straight out of their Windows laptops. And here's one anecdotal report: WASAPI-on-Realtek can do a notch faster latency than my PreSonus Studio 2|4 on my notebook using ASIO, go figger. Dropping the $50 becomes necessary the moment someone wants to record audio. There's just no way around that yet.

Sorry, I didn't mean to dispute your statement. Just speculate as to what might have led to such a tragedy. And I'm really glad to be in an area where people don't have to take that kind of chance. Poor drivers (and those in way to much hurry) abound, and the less they are asked to decide whether it's SAFE TO DO anything, the better. As you mention, even a near miss will stick with you the rest of your life. Very glad that nobody was hurt in your incident!

To go into more detail here, controlling the dynamic range with compression allows the mix engineer to boost elements of a mix that might otherwise overwhelm the rest of it. When I was starting out, I had a pro studio owner friend look over my shoulder while I tried to get a vocal to stand out in a mix. My reference was Elliot Smith's XO album, where his voice is very up front. He taught me how to sweep for honks with the EQ, to highpass, and to compress (using MCompressor, gateway to many for understanding compression) by about 3-4 dB with a 4:1 ratio. This seemed counterintuitive, as I originally thought of it as taking things away from an element that I wanted to stand out, but the effect of all this was to allow me to bring the vocal up in the mix without it overwhelming everything else. It had its own space and didn't poke the ears. Mind: blown. There's another function, which to me is also "basic," and that's to use it psychoacoustically. Compression can make sounds seem louder without the sound actually being at a higher level than the rest of the mix. This is because our sense of hearing has built-in compression, it actually closes down when presented with loud, sharp sounds. This is probably an evolutionary thing, so that our brains won't get overloaded when presented with loud sounds and mess with our ability to escape threats. Another thing that it does on buses (including master) is help individual sounds in the mix stand out. By controlling the peaks and raising the floor, less prominent elements can be brought closer to the front. This is especially true for me on complex instruments like the drum kit. Yet another trick that's a favorite of mine is to use mid-side compression (and limiting) to enhance the stereo field. Even just switching to mid-side mode can do this, but if you get into changing the attack, release, and ratio settings independently, you can really create some headphone candy. In the case of ultra-fast compressors like the 1176 and its clones, you can actually induce distortion as a special effect. Tame Impala's drum sound uses this. It's the "all buttons in" setting that was not originally an intended thing. But some studio person wondered what would happen if you pushed in all the buttons, and another use was discovered. I think that these uses of compression (and limiting) were what they call in the game industry "emergent," in that compression was not originally designed for them. Mix engineers discovered them along the way.

Well, I don't care for arguments as such, either. Your experience and preferences are as valid as mine. And we all want the same thing: software that does what we want without having to keep our fingers crossed that it will work, and without having to develop workarounds for features that are broken. I think that as people continue to use a beloved piece of software, we learn to tiptoe around the things that make it fall down and go boom. And everyone has different paths through complex software. I'm that way with Vegas Pro, I know that it's crash-y and fragile, but it's what I'm used to and I've learned how to tinker with its zillions of options to make it way more stable. And I'm probably the opposite of a power user with it. It has gotten better, but not to the extent that I've seen with CbB. I'm not equipped with the skills needed to report bugs in a video editor. I picked up that recent Humble Bundle with Corel Painter. Never used software like that before, but I found a nice Wacom tablet at Salvation Army a few months back and wanted to try it out for its intended use. I fired it up and started testing brushes and stuff, was having a great time, even came up with an abstract thing that I thought was a keeper. But since I was having so much fun, and started out just fiddling, I neglected to save it along the way, and sure enough, it poofed (crash to desktop with no warning). Can't blame it on plug-ins because I have no 3rd-party ones. My system is based on components that were top of the line for workstation builds half a dozen years ago. I can do video editing, DAW work, game all day long (which I sometimes do, unfortunately). Painter is MATURE software. I remember it being around 25 years ago. WTF Corel? Fortunately PaintShop Pro by itself made the bundle worth the price of admission. Something that I suspect happened along the way was that under previous management, feature addition took precedence over bug fixing, to the point where veteran users lost hope that long-known defects would ever be cured. I've run into resistance among veteran users to report issues to the current team and they'll say that they reported it 8 years ago and gave up. Of course, 8 years ago, it was a different company. Noel B. was obviously given a lot more leeway, hence the focus on bug-smashing. Also, regular users sometimes aren't able to sit with something long enough to crank out a step-by-step so that the devs can reproduce it, and a bug that they can't see is one they can't fix. They're kinda more interested in spending their time making music than beating up on the program. However, I am a geek, and actually enjoy that sort of thing. Making music is a hobby. I love CbB and I hate to see anyone not enjoying the program as much as I do. I used to earn my living as a pro software QA engineer, these phenomena are more common than they should be in the consumer software market. I like to contribute, so I've written up many CbB bugs and frustrations and turned them in. It ain't perfect software by a long shot, but the devs do listen. Some of my feature requests have even been implemented (fit horizontal, toggle numbers from Aim Assist, Replace FX are some of them). My current beg is to be able to delete markers from the right click dialog. Feed me some bugs, in PM if you don't want the chorus of "it works for me, it must be your system or the plug-in's fault." I'll hammer them and if I can repro them, I'll turn them in. You never know....if the wheel don't squeak, it ain't gonna get the grease.

I never had SONAR Platinum as such, but I grabbed CbB within a week of the announcement of its release. You can believe that all those bugs they say they fixed and optimizations they say they made were fake if you want, but on my system(s) if I had paid money for that first release of CbB I would have been dissatisfied enough to return it. A behavior I remember too well is how the audio engine would stop if I moved the playback loop markers more than twice. The status of the audio engine in general was pretty iffy, it reminded me of a balky lawnmower where I'd have to jump off and pull the starter cord every so often. Now I can't remember the last time I got a prompt informing me that the audio engine has stopped. It also did this amusing thing where if I dragged the window to another location on the desktop while it was playing back, the main window would move, but the playhead and vertical indicator line would stay behind, happily cruising along as if the window hadn't been moved out from underneath it. There was this other thing where if I recorded with take lanes closed it would scramble up the resulting clip boundaries. It just felt fragile in general, like I shouldn't click and drag on things too quickly or it would trip over itself, that I had to baby it. It would crash or start playing back weird if I left the program running for too long. I remember months into the improvement process when I was psyched that I had accidentally left the program running overnight and when I got back to my computer the next day, it was still running fine. This was a computer that had already been running a number of other DAW's just fine. I was coming from Mixcraft, which was solid as a rock. The very next release got it working better, then the one after that, and 3 months in, it was clear that the new management had shown up with their a55-kicking boots on. I don't recall any bugs having to do with Tempo or Arranger Track that affected anything other than display of the Tempo or Arranger Track. But this is all my own memory of events, and memory can be funny. Not saying anyone else remembers it better or worse, just saying this is how I remember it. Here are some features that would now drive me nuts not to have in CbB: Ripple Edit Indicator, display of selected note value in the PRV header, display of note names in the PRV, ability to turn off the numeric readout on the Aim Assist Line, Replace FX menu item, open synth UI on replacement, right click menu item to rename clip, fit project to window horizontally (without altering it vertically), configurable Smart Tool, persistent instrument names list in the PRV....

The quote says "two-way undivided portion," which could mean that it was a 2-lane road where passing is allowed on some sections. In Arkansas, where I learned to drive, such roads were not uncommon, and they used to scare the 5hit out of me even though I was a teenager (and therefore invincible). I don't know if the situation is still that way.

Thanks for this, and turning me on to Epic Games' freebies in general. Although Elder Scrolls Online. ... That one has taken over my very soul. Not sure whether to be grateful or resentful!

Wow, examine the tail end of that URL. S**tmaking bundle?

Ouch. Not all of their plug-ins are created equal. Especially in the case of ones where they absorbed another company, as they did with Dodge Pro and Venom. Venom is a sound design powerhouse, and Dodge Pro does the sequenced filter and volume very well. Their main line I see as "Soundspot done right." They have the big cool looking UI's and they combine functions to get quick results for people new to mixing. I eventually found that I could get better results by using individual higher pedigree FX, but I think they still have a place for people wanting to build a tool chest outside of what their DAW comes with. As for vocal doublers, my favorite is still Soundspot's. Does just what I want with a very good visual representation of what it's doing. That's a good inexpensive solution, but there are even freebies, like iZotope Vocal Doubler. Check that out if you need a vocal doubler, it's also excellent. And remember that vocal doubling ain't exactly rocket science, it was invented over 50 years ago by a guy at Abbey Road who set up two tape decks and delayed one by holding a chunk of felt against one deck's reel hub. So you can do it by setting up a bog standard delay plug in with a short delay and long LFO. Then pan dry and delay and voila, vocal doubling.

I also picked up whatever bundles were within reach of my credits. MSoundFactoryLE when it goes on deep discount is a good purchase toward the whole enchilada. I predict that by this time next year, maybe sooner, you too will have achieved MCompleteness.

I've found MeldaProduction's beta releases to be more stable and bug-free than many other companies' final releases.

The strategy is to buy whatever individual pieces come up in deep discount (or freebie) sales. I posted my referral code around and got muchos creditos (especially at VI-Control, those cats are not afraid to spend money). Unfortunately, the places I posted told me to stop, but not before I had leveled up to MComplete. I didn't even post my code with the main intent of grubbing credits, I wanted to help other people get the cool discounts. I would have done the same thing even if there were no referral credits in it for me. Apparently that approach results in good will.

Craig Anderton addressed this question a week ago: https://blog.presonus.com/2023/12/15/why-i-dont-use-compressors-anymore/ I don't quite agree with everything he says, but he does at least mention that compression on buses, including the master bus, can really help "glue" a mix together. Try messing with something like bx_masterdesk Classic that you can get for free at PluginAlliance. Put it on your master bus and try a few presets.

Like looking for reasons not to take your horse and buggy out on a modern freeway: how many do you need?

With REAPER you don't get a chance to meet them because they'll be too busy setting it up and customizing it to leave the house. I can only speak for S1 Artist, but as with any of the DAW's I have installed over the years (Mixcraft, Ableton Live, Waveform, REAPER, Music Maker), I've only ever had one issue with a DAW installation interfering with another. And it doesn't apply to S1. Products by Steinberg (and sometimes MAGIX) just love to install their own rebranded ASIO4ALL WASAPI-to-ASIO wrapper, which will then show up as an available driver in the other programs. Fortunately, it's easily removed, and as I said, it's only Steinberg and MAGIX who I have seen doing it. ASIO4ALL is pretty useless if your program supports WASAPI Exclusive. It seems to cause trouble for some Cakewalk users who have tried using it, although it never bothered my system when I used it in programs that don't support WASAPI (c'mon Ableton, get with the program, well, driver as the case may be), or even when I tried it with Cakewalk.

I don't believe you've ever seen me do it. Unless you consider my reaction to their announcement of adding a cell-based workflow a couple of years ago, "Avid upholds their reputation for innovation." Don't worry, I'll get mine if the day ever comes that Sonar starts shipping with a bundled sampler (I mean again, did they stop because they thought that using samples to make music didn't have a future?). Avid kinda lead with their chin what with the way they treat their userbase, the heavy pressure to subscribe and so forth. It's hard to find a PT lover who also likes the company that sells it. I've found that with a DAW, it's good to be able to see eye-to-eye for the most part with the people in charge of making it. Otherwise, too frustrating. As for the software itself, my contact with it has been slight. It looks like they've done some good work on prettying up the UI recently. The new dark theme looks great, the color scheme reminds me of one of my own Cakewalk themes (Racing Green).

This came from left field for me. Never heard anything by Lil' Yachty before. Seems like he started hanging out with Tame Impala and got into psychedelic rock (the first track on his most recent album sounds like Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd, I kid you not). This song played over the credits of a movie I saw on Netflix and tickled my ears with its cool production and Tame Impala-esque drumming: My only issue with the song is that it's 2:30. It really needs the current ending to be a break and then come back into a chorus before it ends. It's too good ear candy not to be at least 4:00.

The only advantage would be if you have a lot of tracks and they really do the "Distribute your music to major music platforms" thing without somehow revoking it. I mean, once your stuff is in iTunes and Spotify and whatnot, is it possible for them to pull it after 3 days?

I'm not looking for reasons to do so, so feel free to keep them to yourself, but I'd find it very difficult to even find any reason to criticize Mike if someone asked me. He's done a TON to help the CbB user community, and if he has truly quit, his work stands and will be of great help to Sonar users in the future. If touting or using a DAW other than my main one (I also have a license for S1 Artist and think it's stiff competition for Sonar) bothered me, I'd be bothered by a LOT of people (including myself). ? I don't think there's a "bad" DAW on the market. They're all great. Some of them lend themselves better to certain genres of music or styles of music production, but they all seem to do what they do very well, and even afford at least the ability to do things outside their specialty.