Starship Krupa

Based on how many times I see people repeating this piece of Steinberg ad copy, I'd say that it's one of the biggest misconceptions about the VST3 spec. The VST3 spec doesn't require or guarantee that this feature will be implemented in any given VST3 plug-in, and so far, I've seen exactly one plug-in manufacturer implement this feature (Meldaproduction), and they also have the same feature in their VST2 versions. The same much-repeated Steinberg blurb also trumpets that the VST3 spec now supports sidechaining, when I think we all know that sidechaining was possible for years with VST2's even though it wasn't part of the spec. I think the only plug-in maker who use the VST3-native sidechain feature are Waves. The VST3 spec is just that, a specification. There's no magic hand that comes out of the sky and forces developers to implement all the features that are outlined in the spec. And since even now many developers still ship their products in both VST2 and VST3, the code used to build both versions doesn't implement the "advanced" VST3 features. Since I actually have plug-ins that do the silence=sleep thing, I have to say that during mixing, it makes little difference. Plug-ins generally only eat resources when they're processing audio. Check Cakewalk's Performance meter. You can throw on 12 instances of iZotope Neutron and as long as you don't hit Play, the Performance meter will show that few resources will be eaten up. Hit Play, and that's when you better have a rocket sled computer, or dropouts happen. So the thing about it being something great that plug-ins go to sleep when they're not processing audio is kinda snake oil. Maybe @Byron Dickens could weigh in on this? ? I will humbly suggest that if it's your own vocals that regularly "need" Melodyne, yes, learn how to sing in tune. It's not a mysterious innate talent (even I can do it). Your singing voice is an instrument, and the way to get better with any instrument is...practice (duh). Put Cakewalk into loop record mode and sing a verse 5 times in a row over your instrumental track. Then play back each take. Listen for where you're not hitting the notes and take a mental note. Sing the bad notes a few times in tune to wear a groove in what being in tune sounds like. Let your voice rest for a spell, drink some water, then repeat until you get diminishing returns. Do this for a few days (doesn't even have to be in a row) and you'll find substantial improvement. You'll get to the point where subsequent takes will be so on pitch that you can have a choir of Rexes all singing in unison. Melodyne, IMO, is for fixing performances that you don't have control over, like tracks brought in by other people, and/or singers that want to sound professional without doing the work it takes to learn to sing in tune. It's much better if you don't have to fix anything in the first place. As I said, I'm able to do it, and I've never had a voice lesson in my life. I just used the method I suggested (stumbled on it, actually) and it worked a treat. Part of what you're doing is teaching your brain how to hear a note and then direct your voice to create that note. Our brains love learning new ways to better control our bodies and will happily comply, working the problem even when you're not actually practicing. It's actually great fun. Once you're comfortable with hitting the notes, your voice will relax and you'll get performances with better feel. If this doesn't work, then re-record the lines where you missed the note(s) and comp. It takes much less time than farting around with Melodyne, and there's no concern about unwanted artifacts and such.

See my previous post. Dead simple, really. Put the plug-in in the FX rack of the track that whose dynamics you want to control. Make a send on the track you want to do the controlling and choose the name of the plug-in as the destination. Tuning it is more complicated. In the case of compression, the level of the send on the controlling track will affect how the plug-in works. Obviously, the harder you hit it, the more it's going to squash the target track. It's pretty much the same result as adjust the threshold control on the plug-in. I usually leave it at default and adjust it using the plug-in's threshold control.

I was inquiring about MAutoDynamicEQ, not Trackspacer. I've never used Trackspacer on a full mix; the more things you're ducking with it the more likely you are to hear it working, which you aren't supposed to. The way I see its job is to reduce collisions between instruments rather than to carve out a space for one instrument in a full mix. I use it on things like guitar vs. synths, where I have one or more synths that are stepping on the guitar(s). What I do in that situation is that (if I don't already have one) I create a bus for Synths. Then I insert Trackspacer in the FX Rack of the Synths bus. On the guitar track (or bus, depending), I create a send, with Trackspacer as the destination. Then set the large center knob on Trackspacer for the amount of ducking I want. A good starting place is to apply it until I can hear the process of the synths being ducked, then back off a bit and finalize. (that took way longer to type than it does to actually get Trackspacer set up) That is a fine concept for a mixer who can choose his bass and kick sounds from an endless menu before he starts trying to get them to fit together. For people who are working with "a 22-inch cylinder with a plastic membrane stretched across it, hit with a felt hammer operated by someone's foot, recorded with a microphone" vs. "a steel wire plucked by someone's finger exciting a magnetic transducer," there will more often be situations where the sounds will overlap and become indistinct. If I'm creating a song from the ground up with complete control over what sounds I'm using (synthetic), I'll usually just pick and choose the source sounds so that they won't interfere with each other. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess my compositional brain kind of does that automatically. I imagine that Mr. Mau5 works the same way. In electronic genres, you can have way different kick and bass sounds on each song. If it's a rock song with guitar, bass, keys and drums, and the band have a signature sound they want to get across, it's a much different process. Trackspacer is a problem solver. Of course it's best to avoid problems as far upstream as possible.

I think I had the Free/Pro bundle upgrade and MModernCompressor. It was like having bought a sedan and then having the dealer drop off an inverted hovercraft to get me interested in future vehicles. Oddly enough, it worked, although I struggled at first to "get a handle" on MSpectralDelay rather than just tossing it on a letting it do its thing. Something I find is that unlike with say, Glitchmachines or Unfiltered Audio, Meldaproduction's "lab equipment" look encourages me to look at their FX as surgically precise tools, while the truth is there's plenty of weird sound-design-y warpy wibblly wubbly fun to be had there, even in the FreeFX bundle. Throw MComb on a drum mix some time with one of those presets with the moving filters.

That was a loyalty perk. When they released it (has it been 5 years?), anyone who had a license for any Meldaproduction product got an NFR license for MSpectralDelay added to their account.

With sidechaining enabled, I take it? Tell me more about how you set it up. As much as I my policy is usually "try to do it with my Meldaproduction FX first," there are exceptions, and Trackspacer is one of them. I have every effect that Meldaproduction has ever made (also, eventually, ever will make ?), plus iZotope Music Production Suite 5, and nothing (so far) touches Trackspacer for fast, good-sounding results. Attractive, clean UI in standard mode, just the right amount of access to advanced parameters if you want. It's so easy and quick it still feels like cheating after all these years. ? There are some plug-ins that are industry standards for good reason, and after demoing them, I ended up setting aside "I can do this with my existing collection of plug-ins." XLN's RC-20 is another one.

Have you noticed that over the years, in reviews, writers seem to hit Cakewalk/SONAR/Cakewalk/Sonar for being "Windows-only," but give Logic X more leeway? Is that just my perception as a Cakewalk user?

For the most excellent (and free) Soundpaint sampler: https://soundpaint.com/products/copperphone

That is only true for the very bottom of the line stuff. Once you take a step up from the bottom, they do have "real" Asio drivers. Another case of Behringer shooting themselves in the foot by further messing up their reputation.

With as much as he does, It's not the worst thing to see him take a break, esp. if it's in the service of burnout prevention.

MacOS only.

"The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and was confronted with what remained of the Ladeks. The last of them had been rounded up and confined inside a barbed wire fence. But the royal family (Queen Redhorn, Prince Consort 95, twin Princesses 25 and young Princess 15) had survived! The vacation he had promised Ace was not to be."

Do you use a separate graphics card or the video that comes with your CPU? Is your graphic card AMD, nVidia? Can you give us the names of some of the plug-ins that are having the problem and some that are not?

It's been discussed by the Cakewalk devs, and believe me, they would love to be able to trap errors before they take down the whole DAW. According to them, the issue isn't that it's "difficult," it's that it adds overhead. To "sandbox" (keep their operations contained) plug-ins enough to trap errors before the errors can crash or corrupt the host requires so much overhead that it would increase latency and of course resource usage. Think of how long it took Microsoft and Apple to get their OSes to be able to trap application errors and recover from them without the whole OS crashing or becoming corrupted. Windows had its Blue Screen of Death and I forget what the Mac equivalent was. Part of this was because it was, yes, hard to do, but another was that processors had to get fast enough and RAM had to get cheap enough for the overhead to be acceptable. And those conditions haven't been 100% eliminated. Remember when if one program crashed, best practice was to restart the computer entirely, even if it didn't take the whole thing down? Anything that happens between a program asking a CPU to do something and the CPU doing it (such as considering whether what it's just been asked to do will mess something up), takes time (latency). And as far as computer applications go, DAW stuff is some of the most critical as far as latency. Whatever it is that REAPER is supposedly doing, where I see so many people claiming that "I tried it in REAPER and it didn't crash," coupled with REAPER's reputation for being able to run at low latency, I'm sure the other DAW companies would love to know what it is. One of the things I dislike about the situation is the perception of finger-pointing it leads to in situations where you're trying to help someone. While it's true that "99% of the time it's a plug-in," it isn't true that it's the plug-in's "fault." The VST spec is loosely enough written that it's quite possible for both a VST host and a VST plug-in to be completely compliant with the spec, yet still not work together.

I disable the nVidia HD Audio device using Device Manager.

For me, the big advantages to doing the FreeFX upgrade are getting access to the multiparameters/modulators, the internal oversampling, and the styles (I really like to customize the colors). Access to the internal preset manager is not a big deal if you have a host like Cakewalk that has its own preset system. It's nice to be able to access their Online Preset Exchange, but not essential. That Melda feature is one that I think has a lot of potential that isn't being used enough. Also, if your host can oversample plug-ins (Cakewalk can), you're taken care of there. By design, their stuff doesn't exhibit much of the kind of stuff that oversampling is supposed to eliminate in the first place. They're designed not to color the sound except when you tell them to color the sound. They are "mojo" free. You can sidechain MCompressor without doing the upgrade. So we're left with cosmetics, and multiparameters/modulators, which, although I really like the idea of, I have yet to take much advantage of for my own presets. The always visible red nag bar is a little too obtrusive for my taste, but it didn't bother me that much. I used the FreeFX bundle for years before I dropped $25 on the upgrade. I don't consider them "crippled" because the features that get unlocked are advanced ones unique to Meldaproduction that most people don't use. Maybe we use them, but we're advanced users.

Oh, right, you can use the entire Meldaproduction line for 15 days as a trial, and whaddaya wanna bet it worked fine for 15 days and then these registration notices started popping up.... Yeah, wait for the Black Friday sale on Meldaproduction and upgrade the FreeFX bundle to the pro versions for $25. Sign up for their newsletter, use another Meldaproduction user's referral code and you can get the FreeFX bundle upgrade for about $10.

The free Orchestools instruments are pretty good. They allow plenty of sound shaping and have FX built in. But what everyone else has said about learning how to use orchestral instruments is key. Even a freeware instrument can sound pretty good if you use it well, and the priciest sample library will sound robotic if you don't use it well.

Seriously, though, if the OP can at least remember the email address they used when they (presumably) purchased their Meldaproduction licenses, I'm sure they can contact Meldaproduction and get it sorted out. And this time, write the password down. A password protected spreadsheet is a good place to store less-sensitive passwords. Name it "Family Recipes." Whenever you install your Meldaproduction plug-ins on a new computer, registration happens via their server (although it's possible to get a license file for offline use), using the email address and password you used when you bought the licenses.

I think a more pressing issue is that you have your studio monitors pointing at your ankles rather than your head.

I'm skeptical about this. I've run tests, and Meldaproduction processors are consistently the least CPU-hungry in whatever category. If whatever program's "performance bars" aren't reliable indicators of CPU use, Windows has native tools like Task Manager and Resource Monitor that can spot trouble. Increasing the ASIO buffers should just give the processor more time to do its thing, or my understanding of it is way off. But maybe they're right, it's time to dump this unfamiliar "Bandlab" software and try one of the supported programs on their list like AudioMulch* or Hindenburg Journalist (the humanity!). Maybe you can find a copy of Mackie (sic) Tracktion? *I looked at AudioMulch's forum, and back in 2020 Ross, the developer, teased a 64-bit version on Twitter, so maybe by this time he's had a chance to update it.

There is a language barrier here. Can you explain further what "I want to take the samples from the basslines" means? Now "change the bars to the notes/chords I want." I think maybe "measures" instead of "bars" would make it clearer. So, you have a measure, and it has a chord in it, represented by 3 or 4 MIDI notes sounding at the same time. What do you wish to do with the notes in this measure? Trade places with a different measure that has a different chord? Transpose the notes to a different chord? Change the order of the notes in (invert) the chord?

CbB supports 64-bit DX effects. If your old DX effects were 32-bit, it won't see them. Obviously, if they're missing from the system it won't see them either. "Volume" and "Simple Delay" sound like things that you could easily find free replacements for. ReaDelay from Cockos is free and has a minimalist GUI that makes it look sort of like a DX effect.

I admire your self-restraint. Sounds like you have a pretty cool business set up. I've always done my own websites, but if I decide to start another business I'll PM you. I went freelance over 20 years ago and have done a variety of things since then.

Seems like they're doing one of these a week? I'll keep an eye on it, I have many A|A|S soundpacks and Chromaphone and would buy any of them I don't have for 8 bucks.