Starship Krupa

This discussion as to whether SampleTank 4 MAX v. 2 is worth dropping $49 on got me to fire it up and run through some of those Sampletron sounds I hadn't tried yet, the oddball ones like Optigan SFX. There's a huge collection of delightfully lo-fi rhythm loops lurking in those old Mellotron tapes. I guess the idea was that these loops could also function as a rhythm machine for people performing solo. I tend to think of the 'tron as a prog rock machine, but I suspect that it may have been originally conceived as a way for someone to play live as a one-person band. So if yer into lo-fi loops, it's a great collection. And again, there are lo-fi loop libraries that go for the price of the entire package. Yeah, I forgot about the collection of MixBox FX that it has built in. I'm not an IK sales rep either, just a happy SampleTank 4 MAX user. ? When I got this product 6 months ago, multiple installer packages were broken; I wound up having to manually download some of the Mac versions and convert them. They've since fixed most of these issues. That is one area where SampleTank and associated products still have room for improvement: installation and authorization. But I find it worth a bit of slog given the results. BTW, when you install it, make SURE that you select only the products that you want to install, one at a time. Otherwise, if you choose to install the main product it will install EVERYTHING. Between the downloaded files and the installed ones, your drive could wind up full. I made this mistake and had to abort the installation once I saw what was happening. Cleaning up after that was a pain.

His post-announcement videos definitely shook things up around here, but I neither thought of them as disrespecting Cakewalk nor thought of him as a "traitor." I grew up believing that any system/institution needs people to speak the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be, and that systems/institutions are actually harmed when people don't speak up about things that aren't working for them. Keeping quiet out of a sense of loyalty is misplaced loyalty. (I'm an American, that principle is kinda ingrained. Canada went the loyalty route back in the day, Quebec notwithstanding.?) So even though I was bummed to see someone I considered the biggest supporter and promoter of my favorite program expressing doubt as to whether he would continue in that role, I welcomed his critical input. Believe me, the developers paid attention. Read the list of new features carefully and you'll find at least one really cool one that was inspired by Mike's infamous "que es mas clunky" comparison video: in Sonar, you can drag an effect from the Browser directly into a track's Sends rack and it will create a send bus with that effect in its rack along with a new send on the track, routed to that bus. That's a great thing on multiple levels. In addition to being a slick feature, it shows that the Cakewalk devs aren't averse to being inspired by other products. Over the years, I've noticed that publishing a YouTube video is hands-down the best way to get a developer's attention in regard to bugs and "missing" features. I've fantasized about doing one where I go through trying to set up the Drum Pane in PRV with instrument names and eventually rage quit. ? The feelings and opinions he was expressing were also held by me, albeit with less at stake in my case. I have been an advocate of CbB in my own way, here on the forum as well as being the author of the Cakewalk by BandLab Wikipedia entry. I go on board with CbB in large part because I found the transition to freeware fascinating and wanted to see how it played out as far as the quality of the product (my predictions were dead-on, as it turns out). I've set up multiple friends with CbB on their systems, always with the expectation that they would be able to continue using it indefinitely. I did finally update my Studio One Artist to v. 6, largely so I could compare it with Sonar. And, sorry, but S1A compares favorably in several areas. And S1 Artist is a cut-down version of Studio One. And hey, y'know what, there's room in both my budget and my programs drive for both of them. The DAW world isn't an us vs. them thing like it used to be. Compose in FL Studio, mix and master in Cakewalk. Horses for courses. I've said it myself: CbB is hands-down the best free DAW for Windows. Sonar will be playing in the "best Windows DAW for the money" leagues, which is way different. IMO, the competition is now Mixcraft and Studio One Artist, both of which have long-requested features that Sonar does not yet have (integrated samplers being the most prominent). The Cakewalk team have been around in the DAW market for a long, long time. I have faith that they will be realistic about pricing models and new features. The Waves debacle showed the industry that while subscriptions work for some people, they definitely don't work for a significant number of people. They're most appropriate for professionals, and IMO, the more casual hobbyist market is really where the growth is.

I dispute the "4 core" part of that unless you're including virtual cores. My 2-core i7-7600U (16G RAM) notebook can run projects with multiple soft synths, including Chromaphone 3 and Ultra Analog VA-3, neither known to be light on CPU resources. Exponential Audio Stratus, etc. And it doesn't seem to be on the hairy edge of performance with that either.

I don't know about its friendliness as far as sampling or working with samples; I can only speak for my use of it as a ROMpler. I've not found it to be any worse than Kontakt Player for that, yet considerably better than Zampler or Halion. "Tiny" UI? On my system each of its UI views scales as big as I could want, larger even (it can be resized to fill the entire screen, and all elements scale with it). Here's what it looks like, although the forum will shrink it somewhat:

Unquestionably there are better orchestral collections out there, and probably better acoustic pianos, but for the rest....it's an incredible collection of instruments to have access to. I haven't installed any of the acoustic pianos, from Art Deco to Shipwreck, because I already have Meldway Grand in Sound Factory. Similarly, I haven't installed all of the drum stuff. But you only have to want a handful of the instruments in the bundle to make it worth the price. Other than the orchestral libes, the plums for me are SampleTron and Syntronik. Here's my review/comment from VI Control....

Sir Freeze-a-lot. If I were recording solo acoustic guitar music with a vocal, I wouldn't find a Core 2 Quad with 4G of RAM restrictive at all. EQ, compression, maybe a little reverb. That's it. Could do it just fine without freezing or bouncing or any of that.

It seems that one person's "did not look like" is another's "hardly any differences." Yes, the graphical elements have had their 3-D illusions (false shadows and reflections) removed. They no longer mimic physical controls in that way. There are no longer gradients anywhere. However, all of the controls are in exactly the same places they are in Cakewalk by BandLab. So functionally, that's "hardly any difference." Aesthetically, no, it does not look like either Cakewalk stock theme. I have created multiple flattened themes for CbB and came to prefer that look over any sort of fake 3-D, so perhaps the difference doesn't seem to be as much to me. And to me, as well as anyone else who has been using heavily modified themes, the only part of the GUI that's "classic" is the control layout, and that hasn't changed at all. To us, it's as if now there's only going to be one theme, a flat one, with variations between the various elements only in color. It's a difference between flat images and ones that imitate 3-D objects. At this point that's all it is. I like it. It's crisp and its clean, and after using it for a while, going back to CbB feels busy and cluttered, with my eyes getting caught on what look like physical objects.

Kinda surprised this hasn't been posted already; I looked back a few pages and couldn't find it. https://blackoctopus-sound.com/product/sampletank-max-4-v2-2/ Larry will be amused to see that there are 2 prices. For the full license, it's $49.99, but you can crossgrade it from any other IK Multimedia product for only $199.99. ?

The Talos Principle and the DLC are some of the most fun and brain exercising games I've played in addition to just looking beautiful. Also, for fans of TTP, I can't recommend Portal (and Portal 2) highly enough. It was kind of the starting point for that style of game.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned my biggest issue with the new UI so far: reduced type font size in the Transport module. I'm hoping this will be addressed before release, but for now, the reduced size of the time, tempo, time sig and sample rate text make me squint, where that isn't an issue with CbB. At these small sizes, just a single point increase in font size can make a big difference in legibility. Aughhhhh! Sonar caught cross-platform cooties from Next! I'm glad that you're working on a cure.

At least it's nice to know that it works pretty well.

You might get better responses if you typed out MIDI Guitar 2. I had to Google to see what you were asking about. I'm not familiar with the product at all, but with other virtual instruments that support multiple audio outputs, you select All Synth Outputs when inserting the instrument:

Keep in mind that those are suggested specs. I've run the early preview quite successfully on my Dell laptop with a 2 core i7-7600U. I do have hyperthreading enabled so it appears in Sonar to have 4 cores. In comparisons, I haven't found it to be any more resource-hungry than CbB, which I have run successfully on a Core 2 Duo system with 4G RAM. It very much depends on what you're doing and how you use it. Obviously, with a Core 2 Quad, you can't can't run a big pile of resource-hungry mixing plug-ins and/or VI's without doing some bouncing and freezing. So, not to worry, if CbB runs fine on your system, Sonar should run fine as well.

The new look is, at this point, mostly just that, a new "look." The point of doing it is to lay the groundwork for enhanced scaling support and future enhancements. At first glance, the new look is basically similar to using a custom theme in CbB. Everything still works the same way, everything is still in the same place, it just looks better and scales better on higher resolution displays. My hope (and expectation) is that in the not too distant future (next Sunday A.D.?) we'll see things like being able to stretch different elements of console strips to (for instance) give a longer throw on the faders. But yes, as others have said, it's important to know the difference and distinctions between Next and Sonar. Next is a whole new program entirely.

Also, when exploring Analog Lab banks, one of the things I've discovered is that many of them make use of aftertouch, which seems to me to be little-used in other synths.

Oh man, Past To The Future is SO much fun. It's a collection of sounds from famous songs: CMI V : Art of Noise - Moments in Love DX-7 V : Berlin - Take My Breath Away CLAVINET V : Stevie Wonder - Higher Ground Mini V : Kraftwerk - Autobahn Modular V : Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Lucky Man CS-80V : Vangelis - Blade Runner Blues ARP-2600 V : Jean-Michel Jarre - Equinoxe 5 Prophet V : Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes Jup-8 V : Duran Duran - Save a Prayer SEM V : Doobie Brothers - What a Fool Believes Wurli V : Queen - You're My Best Friend VOX Continental V : The Doors - Light My Fire Solina V : Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart Matrix 12 V : The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds Synclavier V : Michael Jackson - Beat It B-3 V : Booker T Jones - Green Onions Stage-73 V : Led Zepplin - No Quarter Farfisa V : Pink Floyd - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun Piano V : Mungo Jerry - In The Summertime Analog Lab 3 : Yazoo - Don’t Go I'm nutzo for noodling around with stuff like that, just for fun.

Well, TBF, they do allow us to at least preview some of the patches via Swatches and the demo tunes/walkthroughs. But yeah, Strum is about the only one that can be relied upon to do what it says on the tin: modeled guitars. I really wish they would do a dedicated drum instrument rather than putting all these kicks and snares and hats in various soundpacks. I don't want to have to put 3 different instances of Player in a project, so the alternative is of course to just sample whatever kick or snare I want. Still, I'd love to see what they could come up with as far as modeling other drum and cymbal sounds. Their engine seems to do metallic really well and some cymbal crashes might be great.

Ahh, yes, for convolution.

Not sure what you mean by that, but I finally did find Beat via Libby newsstand and snagged another pair of soundpacks to add to the bestiary. If you're referring to data collection, well, no, I'm not going to search Libby for anything that would flag me with the NSA. ? I also noticed that Beat has freebie lite versions of Chordjam and Speedrum that are worth picking up. It seems to be exactly similar to Speedrum Lite but comes with a useful bunch of samples and pre-rolled kits. Chordjam is a good thing for fans of MIDI generator-ish plug-ins. Those seem to be dropping left and right these days, I have Loop Engine and now Chordjam Beat but will be letting the smoke settle before looking into any more.

From the ads, it looks more consumer-y than Vegas Pro. Which may not be a bad thing, but every time I try something that's in that vein I get annoyed by the step-by-step handholding they all seem to have. I want to open to a clean, ready to edit interface, not a "friendly" series of screens asking me to add clips, etc. It makes me feel like I'm filling out forms at the doctor's office.

I'm most concerned that I may no longer be able to regularly update Vegas Pro via Humble Bundle.

I picked up both Drumazon and Sigmund as either PB freebies or magazineware. Another reason to be fine with kicking them a few dollars.

Iris could actually benefit from some simplification, IMO. ?

I wouldn't have picked up Trash 2 if it hadn't been part of a very nicely priced bundle I wanted. That said, it's a classic effect and it never hurts to have something like that on hand if someone I'm working with wants a destroyed, abrasive NIN sound on some element or other. As a crusher, it's the crushiest, and it doesn't hurt that it has those modulators. It looks like they're taking a cue from what AIR did with Hybrid, Vacuum Pro, and Drumsynth 500: flatten the UI and remove features. Makes me wonder if we'll be seeing a Break Tweaker 2 with a similar approach (and which I would also pass on, though I love Break Tweaker).

Warning: I went to CAD's page on it and the downloads page only had a spec sheet. That means no ASIO driver unless I missed something.