Starship Krupa

I'm coming up on my 50th anniversary for that. I got into Styx when the local "free form" FM station played the hell out of Equinox. This sounds like a return to that sweet prog bombast, so I must say "domo arigato" for calling our attention to it. Getting their revenge on Dennis DeYoung by reaching back 50 years and pulling out a success.

You said you'd doff your hat if the process had taken him "seconds." I figured that you'd extend your pledge of cranial nudity to others who had such luck.😄 I'm a fuzzy grey myself. As far as why you had to jump through extra hoops on your system....who knows. It's working now, and I bet it will work in the future.

I guess I'm a member of the Naked Head Club then. You shouldn't need to create the directory, the plug-in installer should do it for you, and since it's a subfolder of the standard VST3 path, it doesn't need to be added to Sonar's scan paths either. The install under normal circumstances takes no longer than installing any other suite of lightweight VST3 fx. By "seconds," surely less than a minute. More like <10 seconds on my systems.

Yes, especially the knobs and text. Those are the elements I most want to have larger when I scale a plugin UI. The issue with the hard to see colored rings around the knobs could be solved by making the rings wider, too. Also, I'd really like for the unfortunately named Surround plug-in to be included in the new suite. For anyone who's thinking "nah, I don't do 5.1 mixing," that's not what Surround is for. What it actually is is a spatial effect to add depth and width to stereo material. Among other tricks, it can do the doppler effect when panning. Of course the Haas effect too. If you've never tried it, open the Sonitus fx version and check the help file, try a few presets. You can set up modulation paths to have your source pan back and forth and in and out automatically. At extreme settings, it can even do scratch effects. So it's got nothing to do with surround buses or any of that, what it is is a creative sound design tool. I so SO regret not checking it out before now due to its name. I suggest adding it to the Core suite and calling it Core Spatial. If you're doing game audio or sound effects for film/TV, or you just (like me) like to put spatial ear candy FX in your music, check it out, and if you'd like to have it in the Core suite, post in this topic. (Also mention if you never tried it because you thought it was for 5.1 mixing😆)

I'm impressed. I don't know if I'd have the courage to try it on an Ivy Bridge system, much less Sandy Bridge. 😄

I haven't yet seen one that uses the term "notched" that doesn't use a frequency notch. I'd find it strange for a professional in any field of audio to use that term to describe anything other than....a notch. There's not one in the link you put in your post. Ah, that's the one that combines auditory stimulus with mild electrical pulses delivered to the surface of the tongue. I learned about that when I was poking around. https://neuromod.com/lenire/ They claim pretty amazing rates of symptom remission or reduction in their trials.

The inverse, actually. The method is white noise with a notch right at my tinnitus frequency. You can get more of an idea on this website: https://tinnitusnotch.com/ and/or Google "tinnitus notch therapy." Of course the first few hits will be for sites trying to get your info and sign you up for whatever they're selling, but there is more than one that puts more information and even tools up front. Once I got the gist of what it was about, I decided that I could roll my own using my favorite utilities. MOscillator, swept it until I found my tinnitus frequency, then MNoiseGenerator set to white noise and using its own internal EQ to create the notch. There's nothing magic about using the MeldaProduction versions of these basic utilities. They just happen to be my favorites and have been with me for many years. All you need to duplicate what I'm doing is a source of white noise and an EQ. I put a spectrum analyzer downstream to help me visualize the notch I was creating. That sounds awful. I hope that maybe you can get something out of it. I don't know if it's due to something else I'm doing, but I've felt more clearheaded and seem to have more energy. The only conscious effect of tinnitus I've noticed is that it seems to interfere with critical listening of music, which is bad enough. But my guess is that no noise is better than noise one must tune out. It must take brainpower to do that. I have an odd history with tinnitus; I was bothered by it even more 25 years ago, then it actually subsided, then it's come back in the past couple of years for no reason that I can think of. So I have reason to hope that it is possible for it to subside; I've experienced it myself. The human body responds to stimuli in so many ways that seem counterintuitive. Deep massage, for instance, it can be really painful it first, but a couple of days later the initial soreness goes away and I feel way better. As with most major manufacturers these days, MeldaProduction have an installer shell. It lets you choose which of their plug-ins you wish to install and then installs them. If that's outside your comfort zone, then you should look elsewhere. Melda's hasn't caused me any trouble so far in regard to installing FX and utilities.

Try holding Ctrl and rolling your mouse wheel forward (and back). Works in many Windows programs that display and/or edit text and/or images.

I'd try an external sync box, they're not so expensive. The whole business of syncing and master clocks and whatnots kinda makes my head spin. If I ever need to figure it out I'll probably ask norfolk!

The GT 1030 GDDR5 should do both. Make sure your muzzabo BIOS is up to date of course. I ran mine in my i7 3770 system and now it's in my i7 4770 system running Windows 11. eBay shows them for about USD 45.00 for ones with a blower and USD 50.00 for the fanless ones, which are of course great for DAW use (why I got mine). If I hadn't started gaming on my main system, it would still be in there. Sonar loves it.

I will point out here that Mark is referring to his i7 3770 system. Kinda old. My Windows 11 test system is an i7 4770, not much newer, and it works a treat. If there are any issues with the onboard graphics with a 3770, used nVidia cards are cheap.

The Realtek CODEC shouldn't be using the CPU clock in that way. I should have said that it uses the same clock source as the CPU. Which is more prone to drift and jitter than the clock sources found in interfaces or dedicated hardware clock providers.

You don't want the other plug-ins cluttering up your menus, I presume? I believe the current MPluginManager allows you to individually select which plug-ins from the bundle you wish to install. While you may not be interested in the audio processors, there are other really useful utilities in there besides MNotepad. MOscillator, MNoiseGenerator, MStereoScope, MTuner, and MMetronome are my favorites. While I seldom if ever use MNotepad, I make regular use of the other ones. At this very moment, I'm doing notch therapy for tinnitus using MNoiseGenerator. I used MOscillator to find my tinnitus frequency, then called up white noise with MNoiseGenerator and used its built-in EQ to create a notch at that frequency. For those curious, I've been doing it daily for over a week. It seems to be having a positive effect. I don't know if it's reduced the tinnitus, but I seem to be noticing it less. It's still there if I focus on it, but the white noise seems to distract my brain from it. I'm not even sure that it wouldn't work the same way without the notch, but hey, hard to argue with positive results.

I'm no expert, but I do know that one of the drawbacks of using onboard Realtek CODEC's is that they clock using the CPU's clock, which isn't designed with the same accuracy as the JetPLL'd clocks usually found in external audio interfaces. I've only ever thought of it in terms of jitter, and 250mS seems like a HUGE error outside of any jitter that I've heard of, but I think you're correct in looking to your clocking system, and an external box seems like a good way to address it. Although the Realtek CODEC isn't as terrible at playback as some would have us believe, I wouldn't expect it to perform well at providing a clock signal. As you say, it seems like a miracle that it's worked up to this point.

I found something on MAGIX' website relating to how they had updated the audio engine in Music Maker: https://www.magix.com/int/magazine/music/new-music-maker/ One snippet: "New engine – new sound The audiophiles and tone purists among you will notice, that a new audio engine is under the hood of the latest Music Maker. This is the engine from our professional DAW Samplitude, which we have integrated into Music Maker. Now, your productions will sound even better!" Of course, when they say "audiophiles and tone purists," they could mean "people who claim to be able to hear differences where there are none to be heard."😆 They don't say what those differences are, what to listen for, etc. It would be reaaalllly nice if one of these DAW companies who claimed that their new audio engine resulted in better sound would actually say in what way it sounds better.

This may be blasphemy, but IMO, it wouldn't be the first Orson Wells movie to fit that description. Half of them seem to have some big backstory about the productions having been troubled, or the studio recutting, or not getting a proper release, whatever. While I've never considered my time watching one of his pictures to have been wasted, I've always enjoyed them, the turmoil sometimes overshadows the movie itself.

Sonar isn't a pre-press program, I doubt that it speaks CMYK. The Theme Editor of olde used hex RGB codes.

It's sweet of you to be concerned about my/our possible feelings of disappointment.❤ However, from my perspective, the color options we have access to now are next to none. The screen elements that we can still control are so minimal that I don't know why they were left in at all. Maybe so that the existing custom color Preferences page wouldn't seem completely broken? Unless there are people whose workflow depends on being able to set a bunch of the more obscure automation controls just the right color. So whatever happens, whenever it happens, we'll be going from nothing to something. We can already tell from the differences between the current factory color schemes which colors can be adjusted. Nobody can claim that, for instance, the color of the Browser text is hard coded, or the color of the Control Bar buttons, the color of the clip pane backgrounds, grid lines, PRV background, etc. Unless the palette has been constrained to 50 shades of grey, but even then, being able to have more contrast would be an improvement. I'd be disappointed if there were screen elements that were limited to shades of grey and not colors, but since you've already expressed concern about our disappointment, I hope that at least you'd be there to console us in that event.🥰 The UI is already flat, and I like it like that. As long as button color is now set by changing a value rather than by loading an image, I'm fine with no access to images at all. So far, the people who have spoken up seem to care mostly about legibility, which is all down to color changes and text size. I don't think we'd ever see access to text size customization, so give us access to color settings, as many as possible, please. I hereby pledge to be relentless if not given access to the color settings that I need to make the program more usable.

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of PreSonus' Studio One forum? I pop in from time to time at Cakewalk's Reddit sub. It pretty much illustrates daily why permanent forums are superior. If you think the same questions are asked over and over on the forum, well you ain't seen nothin' like a Reddit sub that's trying to fulfill the role of a forum. No topics, no browsable sub fora, just information that scrolls away.

Posted on both the official Reddit sub and Discord server. There's a bunch of other stuff, but it all sounded like the grownups on the Peanuts specials until I read this: "We’re introducing expanded color customization and theming controls to give you more flexibility in how the DAW looks and feels." The "T" word! They used the "T" word. They don't say when these customization options will arrive, but they've promised in public that we're going to get something.

From the official Cakewalk Reddit sub and Discord server: "We’re introducing expanded color customization and theming controls to give you more flexibility in how the DAW looks and feels." Let the celebration begin!

The good news is that with the new vector UI, it may be easier to allow text sizes to be adjusted. The bad news, of course, is that so far, we can't even adjust colors. Marker text, Aim Assist text, and ruler digits are all things that I've thought were way too small from the beginning. There's plenty of room for larger fonts. Why not use more of it? I've been able to make Sonar's text more legible by setting its own native scaling higher. You access this in the program via Preferences/Display. There's a slider down toward the bottom. Doing that has other drawbacks such as the UI gets more crowded and you lose real estate. But it's at least something to try. It also suggests that the text might be scalable independent from the rest of the UI, which would be wonderful.

Assuming the drum instrument I'm using has individual outs, I've never thought of doing it another way. Maybe this is because I recorded and mixed acoustic drum kits before I worked with virtual drum kits? It wasn't until several years* into working with my DAW that it occurred to me that I could use a drum map to allow a single MIDI file to drive half a dozen different synths. I had been puzzled about the many one hit drum sounds in the soundpacks and other factory sounds for my A|A|S synths. I didn't understand how people were using them, were they sampling them into a phrase sampler? Making 6 different drum tracks, each with its own MIDI? Seemed much easier to just use a Kontakt-based drum machine, or some other one that supports individual outs. Then it occurred to me that a drum map might allow me to put half a dozen instances of A|A|S Player in the project and call up the soundpack one hits in each of them. And it worked. Never thought about what might happen if I tried freezing them, though. *(Sonar's drum map feature took me literally years to get my head around because the Cakelanders and I were speaking different languages. Before CbB, a "drum map" was something I applied to get the kit piece names to show up on the left edge of my Piano Roll. Therefore, using one centered around the piano roll. I was slightly aware that you could do other things with them, but that was the primary use. In Cakelandia, however, a "drum map" is a tool for routing MIDI notes to notes in your drum (or other) instruments. Therefore, it's in the category of MIDI track outputs. It also allows you to display the kit piece names on the left edge of the piano roll, but if you just want that, 95% of the user base either uses instrument definitions or just memorizes which piano key goes with which sound. Using a drum map just to display kit piece names? Yikes.)

No. It didn't, for anyone who paid attention to the notices. Cakewalk by BandLab and Sonar Free Tier have overlapped for weeks. Install them both side by side, ensure that everything works in Sonar, and proceed with no interruption. That's what most users did. It's no more "worthless" today than it was a year ago. Sonar Free Tier is able to use the vast assortment of Cakewalk and 3rd-party plug-ins that came with SONAR Platinum. All of those licenses are still valid. The core program, SONAR, Cakewalk by BandLab, and now Sonar, has changed, but still uses the same project format that Cakewalk by BandLab did. For that matter, SONAR Platinum should still work as well as it did when you bought the lifetime license. It seems that you experienced a bug with the installation of Sonar that somehow broke your ProChannel presets, that's unfortunate, but it's neither by design nor is it common. Contact Cakewalk/BandLab support about the issue, if you haven't already. Installing Sonar definitely should NOT break anything about an existing SONAR installation. Do the presets buttons work in Sonar?

The ProChannel Quadcurve EQ that the user sees when they open the large view of the EQ is a really nice EQ. So nice that I often set aside my policy to avoid DAW-locked plug-ins and use it anyway. I'd like to be able to use the expanded version of it in Sonar's FX bin. It's so much better than the Sonitus/Core EQ.