Starship Krupa

Same. Please let us know what they have to say..

Background: I've been trying to pin down why it is that of all of the programs I use, Sonar is the one that I most feel like I have to tiptoe around in it to avoid doing something that I didn't want to do. I use Ctrl+Z more in Sonar than in any other program. Not coincidentally, I've found it best to map a single keystroke to Select None and use that a lot, too. This led me to suspect that what's tripping me up in Sonar has something to do with its selection and deselection behavior being something that I'm not expecting. That is, there are common actions that result in objects, or multiple objects being selected that I don't expect to result in objects being selected, and/or there are common actions that I expect to deselect things that don't result in the objects being deselected. So I've been watching out for that. Tonight, I identified something. The problem: This has to do with MIDI recording and editing. If I have a MIDI track or MIDI clip selected in Track View, this results in all the MIDI notes from that track/clip being selected. It often happens that I have a MIDI track (and therefore all of its clips) selected due to the fact that I must select the MIDI track in order to have it echo what I'm playing on my keyboard. Having the track selected is as it should be of course, otherwise how does Sonar know which track you want to play into. However, what happens over and over and over ad nauseum is that I record a MIDI track by playing notes from my keyboard, then I go to Piano Roll View to tidy up the notes. INVARIABLY I click on the edge of the first note that I want to tidy up and end up moving the edges of all of the notes in the track simultaneously. Then I curse under my breath, hit Ctrl+Z, then hit my dedicated Select None key, after which I'm finally able to do what I want, which is adjust individual notes. I. Am. So. Tired. Of. Doing. This. I understand that having all notes selected is handy if you want to run quantize on the notes right away, but I usually don't. My most common task after recording is manual adjustment of note start and stop times. There are plenty of times when I do want my editing actions to affect all of the notes, what I'm saying is that this never occurs right after I've finished a take. Ctrl-A is fine for when I want to do that. For comparison, I tried the same operation in 2 other popular DAW's. I didn't have this issue with either of them because selecting a track or clip in their track views doesn't select all the notes in the piano roll. In both cases to select all notes, you right click in the piano roll and choose "select all" from the context menu. I was able to go directly from recording the take to editing a note with no deselecting or undoing or any of that mess and it was like a breath of fresh air. The best solution I can think of is to have the OPTION not to select events with clips much as we now have the OPTION not to select events with arranger sections. It could even have an override, where when you have selecting events with clips turned off, an Alt-Click will select the events.

I had no idea either! I only knew from reading the by-lines! Even after reading William M. Gaines' biography they remained men of mystery, as were the rest of the other artists and writers! I learned more in that book about Arthur the avocado plant than I did about Mort Drucker! The biography went into some detail about the career of Harvey Kurtzman, who by that time had not been with Mad for many years. It was like looking at record sleeves and seeing the names of session musicians and engineers and producers. If it wasn't George Martin or Phil Spector, it was a mystery! We knew that Elton John's records sounded great, but who was Gus Dudgeon? They didn't seem to get much work outside of Mad! Jim Davis at least did some work for Sports Illustrated and did some movie posters for Hollywood! If I remember correctly, one of the original lobby posters for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (known to Mad readers as "Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid") was drawn by Mort Drucker! I do know that the influential French illustrator and cartoonist Jean "Moebius" Giraud was strongly influenced by Drucker in his early period! This was before he developed the style he later became known for! If you look at his early work, especially the Western comics, the shading and crosshatching are Drucker all the way!

This has been my playbook for some time now.

Even using the Cakewalk Plug-In Manager doesn't stop them from being scanned, it just keeps them from being displayed in the Browser and other lists within the program. The first thing I do to keep things clean is make sure that my music and video programs aren't scanning anything they don't need to. Only install VST3's, and since plenty of manufacturers' installers install unneeded formats anyway, I manually go into my VST2 folders and delete things that are already installed as VST3's. For tidiness' sake, I also go into my C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins folder and delete anything I find in there because I don't run Pro Tools. I don't do it as often as I once did because fewer and fewer vendors seem to be scattering clutter around. Every so often some installer will also dump something in C:\Program Files\VstPlugins or C:\Program Files\Steinberg, and I just delete whatever I find there because I have custom folders for my VST2's. Other than that, it's harder to do with VST3's because there is a canonical standard location for them, but it is possible to disable them just by moving them to a different folder. I do this with all of the non-purchased T-Racks plug-ins that IK Multimedia's installer puts in my VST3 folder. I have a folder called C:\Program Files\Common Files\T-Racks where I drag all of the .VST3 files that I haven't purchased. This could also be done for others that you just don't want to scan. I've been doing these things for years and have yet to run into any issues regarding registry entries, although anything is possible. I'd say just make a subfolder of your VST3 directory called VSTNO or whatever where you will put the plug-ins you don't want to scan every time. Then drag that folder out of the VST3 folder tree when you don't want to scan for those plug-ins and drag it back when you want to use them again. The only problem there is that installers will just happily put the latest versions of their VST3's in the top level and you'll wind up with 2 of them, maybe even different versions, being scanned. There's also this, which I'm kind of surprised I don't see anyone talking about on this forum. I haven't tried it so I don't know if it would serve your purpose: https://www.kvraudio.com/kvr-studio-manager

Had a subscription as a kid! I lost interest in the 80's! I wasn't watching the TV and movies that they were parodying! The last one I read, bought off the rack, was when the Watchmen movie came out! Mort Drucker and Angelo Torres were amazing illustrators and caricaturists!

The most important things to know before recommendations can be made are: Price range How many audio channels do you wish to be able to record simultaneously? Do you need 5-pin MIDI connectors? The price for decent audio interfaces starts at around $50 for something from a reputable manufacturer who supply an ASIO driver with it. The $50 buys you a single mic/line input and a line input, 2 channels simultaneous recording. 2 mic/line inputs will cost you another $15. Check this out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mackie-Interface-Onyx-Artist-1-2/dp/B07664LMPQ/

I consider myself a cheapskate, really. Part of the fun of the hobby for me is seeing how much I can do/get for how little cash outlay. So by "budget," I mean "how much I will allow myself to invest in a mic" rather than "how much disposable income I have to put toward this hobby." May be the same with you. The Baby Bottle SL is the first mic I've ever bought brand new as well as being the most money I've ever spent on a single mic. My most expensive mic before this was my AT 3035. Nice mic, purchased used for well under $100.

Nice mix and performance. I like the double track effect on your voice. The parts that don't have it seem....less by comparison. I'm on my laptop listening via my Altec Lansing Mini Life Jacket, so not the best fidelity, although a sound I like and know. I might have put a little slappy delay on the vox, just above the limits of perception. Still wish I had your singing voice....

To be honest, I wouldn't have expected a huge improvement in performance relative to your old system. At some point in specifications, perceptible performance isn't going to improve by that much for DAW use. The new system improves upon the memory speed and graphics, which are two areas that will yield better perceived performance, so you're covered there. You haven't mentioned exactly what performance improvement(s) you were expecting. We assume around here that people are striving for ever-lower latency, but that, too is at some point constrained by USB or Firewire technology. Latency, screen drawing, what is it that you are seeking? What kind of projects do you commonly do? Orchestral pieces involving sample libraries? Audio with many FX? Electronic with many soft synths? Scoring to video? The resources that those different types of project depend on are....different. Sample libraries like a lot of fast RAM and fast disk for loading. DDR5 and NVme. Audio with FX and electronic likes faster processors with more cores. Scoring to video wants a good video card. As far as I can tell, your system has all of those things. It's a Dell, so it's well-integrated. The only issues I've ever run into with my Dell towers were due to manufacturers' drivers not working as well as the (older) drivers supplied by Dell. The Audiobox 96 is a time-tested and currently-supported interface. One thing to check that people sometimes neglect is the possibility that a cable has gone bad. When I purchased my (used) PreSonus Studio 2|4, it came with a USB A to USB C cable. It had crappy performance until I tried a new cable.

Do you have the BandLab subscription that enables you to activate it?

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.