Starship Krupa

IMO, unless Sonar comes out with a bunch of new, major features, it's now playing in the under $100 leagues, not the $199 leagues that it was in 6 years ago. Yes, it's gotten a ton of much-needed bug fixes and smaller new features (nested folders, ripple edit indicator, and on and on). But the only major ones I can think of are Arranger and Articulations. The competition is now Mixcraft, REAPER, Studio One Artist. Still no sampler, no chord track. We'll see what the future holds. I've been a fan of the current development and licensing models.

That's not the first Cakewalk Sonar, though, that's the last Cakewalk By BandLab.

I don't think so. They've mentioned an extensive re-tooling of the UI, including (I think) native scalability, which means vector graphics instead of the fixed bitmaps Cakewalk has. That is a HUGE undertaking. It ain't like creating a Cakewalk theme, which I know myself can itself take weeks if you really go deep and change every element you can. This is the first UI overhaul of this magnitude since SONAR X. So if they're really going to change every menu and view (including things like Staff View), we're looking at quite the time frame. That's blowing the dust off of some very dusty code. I'm not sure why they would have announced it so far ahead of the release, it's induced a bit of FUD among the user base. Including some YouTube heavy hitters who had spent years pitching CbB as the best choice for a free DAW. Cakewalk Sonar is now going to need to be the best DAW for the money, which is a tougher league to play in. So, yeah, hoping for some long-awaited features besides the UI overhaul. I've spent so many years babbling about what a great deal CbB is to my friends who haven't yet gotten into home recording that I want it to still be a great deal.

Which means that she thinks you could pull that off. ? She won't laugh once the house starts filling up with rack modules....

Now we're really getting bogged down.

The hidden messages in the text that we put in bold, I think.?

Sad, no Vegas Pro this time. Video Pro just didn't do it for me.

Aww, it's all in good fun. It's fun to take cheap shots at certain "institutions." Pro Tools users can be plenty ignorant/dismissive of other DAW's. So I like to talk a bit of smack about how the so-called "industry leader" no longer does any leading. Are other DAW manufacturers looking to Pro Tools for inspiration? I suspect not. Is this feature going to lure users in from other DAW's? No way. It's a way for existing users to dabble in this newfangled "loop" thing. And I'm with you on that Dark mode. I was watching a video and spotted XPand! 2 on the screen, hosted by a DAW with a slick-looking flat dark UI (reminded me of my Green Flat Dark CbB theme). Couldn't figure out what it was until you posted.

Although it seems like a good addition to their usual mixing craft, the performance of this panel might have problems considering it's in Pro Tools. I imagine that this matrix is best viewed on a second monitor.

"The Sketch window presents a grid of Cells into which Audio or MIDI clips can be imported or recorded. Vertical Tracks host either audio clips or MIDI...." "The completed song can be exported as a .wav. However there is deeper integration into Pro Tools available. Rather than exporting ideas created in a non-linear environment into Pro Tools, Sketches can be played back in in sync with a conventional linear Pro Tools session, combining the best of both linear and non-linear workflows." Sounds like this "matrix" of cells is able to do a ton of things. Avid leads the way once more!

Perhaps Pete is who God and Jesus delegate less critical matters to. If it's life or death, it's for God's sake, if it's coming to lunch because your buddy hasn't seen you in weeks, that's a Pete. As for what atheists ask themselves, I'm an apatheist (look it up) and I ask myself WSID. What Should I Do that's in accord with the principles I value? When working on amps, I ask WWLD, which is What Would Leo (Fender) Do.

Yikes. I can't reference to the Dan because it sounds too good, like referencing to David Tipper. It just depresses me!

Ah, thanks. I'm going by my old Dell Optiplex. When I turned on everything but C-States, it actually overclocked its i7-3770 a little, and nailed it hard at that frequency. I thought I was slick for figuring out how to overclock a Dell ?. I guess as with every BIOS tweak, the thing to do is test it well before and after and go with what works.

You are not wasting your time. For under a hundy, you can get some more life out of that computer and be happier. The 3770 is the fastest CPU with the most cores in that series, so yes, you would see a difference. It'll handle more plug-ins before it chokes. As for the video card, it depends on what you're doing with the system. I just bought a used GTX 1070, and I think they're in the sweet spot now for price vs. performance in the bottom-feeder market. Mine has a total of 4 outputs. Two of those are DisplayPort, and DisplayPort to HDMI adaptors are a $5 item. I'm currently running 3 monitors on mine, and it's not getting near to breaking a sweat. With 8G of VRAM, it better not. The 1070 is a nice, quiet card for DAW work, too. It's smart enough to spin the fans down to zero when not under load. If you're not playing any games on the system, the GTX 650 is definitely adequate. If you are, it will handle most indie games, really anything that's not the latest Esports or FPS. No Read Dead Redemption on ultra, but if that's of interest, pop for the 1070. Make sure that everything runs from SSD's, and if you have an M.2 slot on the motherboard, an NVme for the OS and programs can speed things up a little too. One caveat to CPU upgrades: I got tripped up by the motherboard supporting the newer processor, but only after a BIOS update. Fortunately the MB allowed that from a thumb driver or I would have been SOL. Do it before you take the old CPU out. A 3770 should suit you fine for a couple more years. One of the Cakewalk developers has a 3770-based system in his studio. All the upgrades I suggested will drop just fine into a new system except for the CPU of course. So it's not money tossed away, when you finally do get a newer system and want to hand this one down you can put the 650 and your old boot drive back in. Something that people forget to do that can really help performance is to take the computer out on the porch and blow all the dust off the fans and CPU cooler. The cooler a computer can run, the quieter and faster it can run.

I have a soft spot for Dells; they're built like tanks and often available for crazy low prices on the used market due to their popularity in corporate environments. An Optiplex 7010 was my main DAW for years and I produced some good music on it. Having said that, yes, they are locked down as far as BIOS options. The UI hasn't changed in probably 20 years. Companies don't want someone's gamer kid coming in on the weekend and overclocking the CPU and memory. And they are built for reliability, not speed. But with some coaxing and tuning, they can make decent DAW or gaming rigs (the latter when coupled with a decent graphics card). Fan control is one of the things that's hard to do on Dells, which limits such options for DAW use. mspeng.exe is Defender. Defender is set up by default to check every file that is read or written to disk. Since it's a Dell, you likely have Pro, if not, licenses to upgrade to Pro can be had for under $10. Pro will allow you to permanently disable realtime file scanning. Even if you don't have Pro, Windows will still allow you to exclude directories from realtime scanning. I suggest excluding all directories that have to do with DAW work, such as the DAW's program directory and project directories, VST's, sample locations, etc. And don't worry about the security aspect, even if you disable realtime scanning, Windows will still scan files on your drive, just not constantly. Also, turn Speed Step back on, along with all the other Intel features EXCEPT C-states. One last thing: Dell is known for really pushing their own drivers. This is sometimes a good thing, they tend to work well with Dell's hardware. However, I have had it happen that Intel's own driver makes for better latency. Sometimes it's the other way around. I once had latency go to hell on my Optiplex, so I fired up LatencyMon and found that ndis.sys was the culprit. That means networking, so I rolled back the NIC driver and everything was fine. And plus one on a wipe and OS install if you can do it. In summary, though, if the system's use is going to primarily DAW, there are probably better choices for the money than Dell. You pay a premium for a Dell, and that money can be worth it if you're buying a dozen of them for employees to use in a business environment. Solid as hell, last for years. Like I said, they are a killer deal on the used/refurbished market. You can get what was a powerhouse system 5 years ago for peanuts (partly due to the Windows 11 security incompatibility). With a DAW, you might want to put that money into a quieter case and a mobo that allows more fan control. Quiet PSU like a Corsair, Thermalright fans. If you're gaming or doing video NLE, a better graphics card that's smart enough to spin its fans down to zero when it's not under load. If you haven't partsed up a PC in 10 years or more, you'll likely find that it's much simpler these days in a gamer-driven market. Companies make their components now with an eye toward ease of custom builds. It used to be they assumed that components would be going into pre-builts done by professional integrators. My $.02 after using Dells for decades. Typing this on my corporate-retired Dell Latitude....

Yer tellin' me! I hate to see people in distress over their music software, so I try to help, but really, even a Google search for answers to some of these perennial questions will yield results from this forum. The search engine here is not as bad as the one on the old forum, but yeah, it has issues with trying to find relevant posts. It very much favors recent topics over relevant ones. One I detest is the one at the KVR Forums. If you try to search for MModernCompressor in the MeldaProduction forum, the search engine kicks it back with a message saying that the search term is too common. Really? I think I'm the only person who's ever started topics on it over there. @mibby can back me up.

Thanks for turning me on to something that should have been obvious to me: I just checked Orders to see if MModernCompressor and MAutoAlign were in there, and noticed that there is a gap between November 2022 and April 14, 2023 (which I think is around when I bought Chromaphone), after which it lists 26 orders on April 14-15, all for plug-ins that I bought years ago, like the Orchestral Companions, some later ones like Freakshow Industries' lineup, and a big pile of freebies of the month. Unless memory really fails, I did NOT buy 26 plug-ins over 2 days around US tax day. Especially not ones that I'd already been using for years before April 2023. And I don't think I went 6 months without buying anything from PB, although that is possible. I did declare a moratorium on new mixing plug-ins around late 2022, so maybe I stuck to it better than I thought. This suggests that they did some database work around that time that could have included contacting plug-in manufacturers and getting lists of licenses registered by me regardless of whether I purchased them from PB or directly from the manufacturer. There are also other purchases in there for plug-ins that have incorrect dates. W.A. Production and iZotope are also well-represented in the "wrong date" zone. I guess that for a huge database that contains purchases from millions of people (I assume) going back for such a long time, corruption becomes increasingly possible. Complicate this with freebies, store bundles, and it seems pretty daunting. Good reminder not to rely on PB to keep my license info safe forever. Put those serials in a spreadsheet. I don't always remember to do this, but I have a Google Sheet with many serials in it.

Bridget is the queen of topic necromancers, but y'know, it means that she's at least using the search feature and reading the topic. I've seen enough "why aren't my VST2's showing up in Cakewalk?" one-post wonders to last a very long time.

I've lived with gallstones for over 25 years. Including the diagnosis failure, although, thank heavens, that only went on for 2 years rather than 8. My issue there was that I was going into the ER, where their focus is triage, not diagnosis. So they'd put me on a morphine drip (what those in recovery call a "freelapse"), which didn't stop the pain. I'd only get relief if the morphine drip put me to sleep. They'd supposedly make an appointment for me with my primary care physician, but I'd never hear anything. Turns out my primary care physician (who was an idiot anyway) had retired, and the requests from the ER were going into the ether. Hell, even my DAW's will let me know if I try to load a program that uses a plug-in that was deleted. Once I knew what brought them on, I managed it by, duh, not eating a huge amount of fat at one time. Stick to a regular order of fries. Can't eat deviled eggs at all for some reason. I had a couple of attacks recently, after decades without one, which is worrying, but they were brought on by being in a fasted state followed by fatty meals, so, my bad and I paid for it. Lying on the bathroom floor in so much pain I was moaning and howling. And the worst part is that it goes. on. for. hours. An acquaintance of mine, mother of twins, said that gallbladder attacks hurt more than having twins. I believe it. I think the enthusiasm in the medical profession for yanking gallbladders is because dietary habits are really difficult to change. It is possible to avoid attacks with diet management, but it's too hard, so doctors don't even try. Their patients get their gallbladders taken out, problem solved, no more attacks. They leave 'em in, old habits die hard and they're back in the ER. The side effects of not having a gallbladder scare me more than fear of having another attack, which should tell you something. There are some gallstone patients who absolutely do need to have them out, there can be so many stones that the gallbladder gets distended, or they get lodged in the duct and threaten other organs. But it is possible to manage it through diet. It's too bad, because I like fasting every once in a while, it feels good. And who doesn't love fatty foods? But if I'm in that fasted state, I have to be really careful and come out of it eating steamed rice and vegetables (which I find delicious anyway), not a trip to Five Guys or New York Pizza. I've also been "blessed" with kidney stones. Passing a kidney stone, what it feels like going through the urethra is nothing compared to what precedes it, which is spasms that feel like being punched in the lower back and sides by a bareknuckled George Foreman. It's weird, because for a few seconds, you're in this INTENSE pain, then the spasm ends and endorphins kick in and you feel fine. Repeat. I've vomited from the pain from passing a k-stone. The last one that came out was at least 4mm in diameter. I kept it, it looks like a very bumpy asteroid. Staying hydrated is an issue as well, with the ADHD I get intensely on-task and forget to drink. So I try to always have beverage fixin's on hand, my favorite is a 1:2 mix of fruit juice and seltzer water. I can slam that stuff all day. Congratulations on the gig from heaven. I know those moments both from playing and from being in the audience. Just one of those can make up for years of the drudgery of keeping a band together. And what I particularly like about forms of music that involve a lot of improvisation. When that blue bolt comes down from the sky, there are few things that make me feel so alive and in the moment (one of them is obvious, another is dancing with a good partner).

Cameo appearance from good ol' workhorse XPand! 2 at 16:45. (edited thanks to User 9-whatever). I can't ID the DAW, though. Nice look to it, dark, flat, with green highlights. When it first flashed by I thought it was CbB with my Green Flat Dark theme, but on freeze-frame, it's obviously not. It's not Pro Tools, DP, Logic, or Cubase, either.

I know I have done so. I go through my PB account every once in a while to see if there are any updates posted, and since MeldaProduction updates their stuff so often, of course the MeldaProduction stuff said that an update was available, and that alert won\t go away until you click on the link. That's another reason the entry for MModernCompressor is strange: I check every couple of months, and only just noticed it now. Of course. I'm sure that many of us bargain hunters have done so. I have two licenses for Boz' Little Clipper because it went on sale for $5 after I bought the first one and then forgot about it. Especially vexing to know that I now had 2 licenses for a plug-in I couldn't find much use for, to the point of even forgetting that I had it. I didn't even notice until I went to Boz' website to download it, checked my products page and found 2 licenses. In the case of MeldaProduction, though, it's not possible to buy the same product twice unless you also start another account with them. What you get from a dealer is just a number, which they convert to a MeldaProduction license on their website. In typical MeldaProduction fashion, the way they handle licensing is a little different. You don't ever get a "license number" that you type into a little box on the plug-in to register it or whatever. Instead, each license is tied to your MeldaProduction account, and to activate it, you enter your account information (name and email address). They of course also have a way to do it where the system doesn't have to connect to the Internet, you download a license file which will authenticate all of your plug-ins. MModernCompressor is the plug-in I own least likely to get a double purchase for the same reason I was stumped by this situation: it was the first of their plug-ins I bought after getting the FreeFX upgrade, and one of the first 3rd-party plug-ins I bought that I considered to be "professional," rather than a loss-leader freebie or bargain basement purchase. It was the start of my increasing my plug-in budget and seeking out ones I considered to be the no compromise best in their class rather than settling for using only things I could get for under $10. Also, it's always been something of a problem child in my lineup due to having that odd dynamics distribution display taking up so much real estate. It's the feature that's supposed to set it apart from other compressors and I don't think anybody but a couple of people on their forum even use it. Watch Chandler's video where he rounds up all of the MeldaProduction compressors and demonstrates them and tells what situations he would use each for. When he gets to MModernCompressor, he kind of pauses and admits to never using it and says it might be good for spoken word. Even their paid brand advocate can't get excited about the thing. It's got an "Island of Misfit Toys" charm about it, complete with an undiscovered talent, which is front page access to the different detector models, (including "psychoacoustic"). The only other MeldaProduction processor that has that detector mode is MDynamics, where you have to dig 2 or 3 panels deep to get at it, and it still doesn't have all of the ones that MModern does. Making good use of something that I don't think other people know about is fun. ? In that same video, Chandler digs into MDynamics deeply enough to see the psychoacoustic selection for the detector, and multiple commenters said they never knew it was there and were excited to try it. I've been using it for years, neener neener. It's not a duplicate. Even if it were, I wouldn't care. A LOT of my MComplete license was paid for with referral credits. Once I had the FreeFX bundle and MEssentialsFX bundle, there weren't really any MeldaProduction products that caught my fancy unless they were put on deep discount, like MTurboAmp and MSoundFactoryLE. If someone asked me which of their plug-ins to buy, I'd say upgrade the FreeFX bundle and get MEssentialsFX and that would do it. The rest of the line is high quality but none of them are must-haves, IMO. MPowerSynth is underrated as far as sound, but when it comes to programming it, it's as impenetrable as one would expect from MeldaProduction. But the credits kept rolling in (posted my code on VI Control where the deep-pocketed play and tried to provide useful information along with it) so I kept getting more licenses. It is of no actual consequence and will stay as a curiosity and a reminder to sometimes check whether everything is as I remember it. Rashomon is one of my favorite movies for a reason. Watch it and you'll never again trust your memory or anyone elses!

Aside from the excellent MCompressor and MEqualizer, and the utilities, anyone who is interested in warping sound in novel ways should sit down with whatever source material and go through the filters and modulators just to get a feel for the depth of them. The comb filter is just crazy. I was working on a remix for someone recently, and they had baked in hard panning of some percussion elements that had made the mix unbalanced in the high end. Went through my collection of MeldaProduction stuff and found MSPectralPan. It let me choose a precise frequency range and pan it more toward the middle, without messing up the rest of the stereo field. I figured that it was have been one of the things that I had picked up when I got MComplete, but nope, it was from the FreeFX bundle.

Without a referral code the price leaps to a wallet-emptying $16. If they have another of those crazy 65% off all bundles sales, the thing to do is use that first-time referral to get the FreeFX upgrade and MEssentialsFX, which has their best processors in it (Also, the extra "s" in MEssentialsFX is where the "s" at the end of the company's name wound up after it was misplaced).

Well, I am not 100% certain. As I get older, my certainty about what I remember becomes less certain. ? I remember having the newsletter credit, and I remember wanting to get a really top quality compressor, and remember waiting for MModern to come around on the eternal madness sale, and I remember posting on their forum that I couldn't get one of the features to work correctly.