Starship Krupa

Line it up against a Tesla and I bet you could blow its DAW(s) off.

I don't know what everyone else is doing, but I have a LOT of plug-ins (over 700) and the VST3's on my laptop's C drive take up 13G. Cakewalk itself is about 1G. Most other DAW-related files may be moved to other drives. As others have mentioned, if space is getting that tight, a larger C drive is in order. They're getting pretty cheap, not worth worrying about.

Curious: when you buy a software license, do you expect to be able to keep successfully installing and running the software forever? No matter what changes are made to your operating system of choice or what happens to the company who sold you the license? If so, IME that's not realistic. At some point, it will cease to function. That happens to all software. It's a good policy to be able to transfer important projects (if you're not willing to pay to keep your version current, which, given we don't know what BandLab intend to charge for Sonar....). Usually with Windows it's safe to expect that a program will keep working for at least 5 years. If something catastrophic happens, like the parent company being dissolved (as in the case of Cakewalk, Inc.), then all bets are off. The company that created and licensed SONAR has been gone for almost 6 years. The fact that another company stepped in and has kept their licensing server running for all this time is very fortunate, and not something that was guaranteed. I only have one product licensed by Cakewalk, Inc., the CA-2A compressor. As soon as I found out that Gibson was halting everything and dissolving the company, I made sure that I had the offline registration process set up. My guess regarding your current crash issue is the same as Tim's: misbehaving plug-in. Given that you seem to be attached to trying to keep using very old software, my suspicion is that there is a plug-in or two that aren't playing nice with CbB. CbB still supports use of 32-bit plug-ins, but any plug-in that hasn't been updated by the manufacturer to 64-bit is now long out of date and no longer supported by the manufacturer. Plug-in hosting is the most difficult task a DAW or NLE can do, and it's asking a lot of CbB to play nice with older 32-bit plug-ins. If you're inclined, the thing to do to sort it out is to switch off plug-ins one at a time until you find the one(s) that are not getting along. Then substitute something newer.

Cakewalk. "Cakewalk" is the audio software brand. "Catwalk" is where the guy in Right Said Fred did his turn back in the 90's. From the documentation: You can add both MIDI and audio effects directly from the Track view. Cakewalk adds these effects in real-time, preserving your track’s original data. To add an audio effect in the Track pane Do one of the following: In an audio track, right-click in the FX Rack and choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu. Click the Insert Plug-in button at the top of the FX Rack and choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu. Use the FX Rack to add real-time effects You can also drag plug-ins from the Browser (B) to an FX Rack. To replace an effect with a different effect, right-click an effect and select Replace Audio FX, then select the desired effect. From YouTube: A great place to start for using Cakewalk in general is @JohnnyV's set of video tutorials.

By jove, I think you've got it! I wonder if it has a Steam client as well.

The goalposts were set at "proper DAW" by the person who posed the question. Waveform and Logic Pro are a couple more that don't "cost somewhere around [$250] for updates."

Apologies, Swatches isn't actually a ROMpler, although I use that word to describe it. It doesn't derive its sounds from samples, it's a playback-only collection of presets for A|A|S' line of modeling synths. I call it a ROMpler because the user has no way of altering any of the parameters. Apparently, A|A|S use the same core engine for all of their synth products, so the same player works with presets for any of them. This means that you can buy only a sound pack (collection of presets, usually over 100 of them), and all of them will play using the A|A|S Player. So Swatches is really a selection of about 10 presets from each of A|A|S' preset collections, which span their entire line, Chromaphone, Strum, Lounge Lizard, Ultra Analog, Multiphonics, and String Studio.

What @Byron Dickens said about learning to trust your ears goes for sure, but at first, we all started with recipes and visual feedback. Especially with compression, our ears need to be trained to hear what's going on. EQ is easier, of course, but there are plenty of subtleties to that as well (I'm still amazed by the effect that changing EQ on one track can have on another track, even though I understand it intellectually). When new with this stuff, I think it's better to take advantage of the more "precise" tools that are available these days. My personal favorites are CbB's built-in QuadCurve/ProChannel EQ and MeldaProduction's free MCompressor. Both give excellent visual feedback as well as sounding great and being versatile. CbB's Sonitus compressor also has good visual feedback, but I find it a bit more complicated, and the display is kinda small. Things like the SSL console strip are for later, after you've absorbed what all of these processors do, what effect their settings have, can hear what they're doing without needing as much visual feedback, etc. They emulate the old analog hardware workflow, which can add character to your sounds, but had/has limitations (especially in the area of visual feedback and precision) that we're no longer bound by. Parametric EQ that displays your EQ curves with a spectrum analyzer built in?? Back in the hardware days it would have seemed like a miracle device. The MeldaProduction Free bundle also comes with MAnalyzer, which I like better than SPAN. It comes with preset curves that allow you to overlay your own mix to compare spectral balance with that of songs from various genres.

@Mike Palmer: please change the friendly output name so as not to give us would-be helpful forum people hissy fits about ASIO4ALL. ? Who knows if Microsoft changed something about OneDrive that boogered it up? It's best practice to pause operations like OneDrive and other file sync while you're doing DAW and NLE and other demanding work anyway. Run checkups on any associated drive(s), set OneDrive not to sync while you're mixing.

There are plug-ins you can put on your final bus that do frequency correction and room simulation (be sure to bypass it before export!) HoRNet VHS is one, only 4 euros. What headphones are you using? You can get some well-respected cans for not much over $100. If you're on a budget, I'm a fan of the Superlux 681/Samson SR850. In Samson form, $35 from Sweetwater. There is a profile in HoRNet VHS for these headphones. As for your challenging room, anything you can do to kill reflections will help. Hanging blankets on each wall. Bookcases make amazingly good sound traps. As mentioned earlier, whatever you use for monitoring, it's vital to listen to your favorite music using the same system. Keep those cans on your head and listen on your phone. When you're working at the computer, keep a radio station playing on your monitors. In general, to get mixes to "translate," once you get it to a certain point, listen to it against a reference track, a song in a similar genre that you think is well-mixed. Play both your reference track and your own track on as many different systems as possible. MeldaProduction's FreeFX bundle includes (among many other goodies) 4 tools that will be of great help to you on your journey: MCompressor, which is the compressor that many have cut their teeth on, due to its very informative display; MAnalyzer, a spectrum analyzer that comes with presets for a variety of genres so that you can compare your tonal balance; MOscillator, a tone generator that you can use to "sweep" through the audio spectrum at your listening position and find out what frequencies are over and under-emphasized; and MEQualizer, a 6 band EQ with a built-in spectrum analyzer. When you're running compressor setup tutorials, there's nothing better (that I know of) than MCompressor for following along and getting visual feedback to go with what you're hearing. Eventually, of course, you'll let your ears take over, but visual feedback is important when learning.

Whoa, I didn't know that. That is indeed a crock. I mean, I have upgraded systems several times since first purchasing PA product, which makes me wonder if I'm in danger of bumping up against this limit. Has anyone here ever run afoul of it? How do Plugin Alliance respond to pleas for clemency? In encouraging news, I have updated BIOSes without losing PA authorization, so I wouldn't bother with wasting a deactivation on a BIOS update. You can still deactivate offline systems. Still, that is one harsh policy.

If you'd rather get Baby Comeback, Pluginboutique also has it for $35. I'm giving it serious thought just to get an upgrade for EXPOSE. Wouldn't hurt to have an extra LEVELS license either.

My favorite freeware ROMpler, A|A|S Swatches, has been updated to include sounds from their new Ice Crystals sound pack. It's now up to 680 sounds. 10 hours of fun just to spend a minute apiece auditioning them. And you will find something useful in there.

If they didn't have a few nice freebies, I'd say all they wanna do is take your money:

Am I the only person who gets this mental picture whenever I see "MacOS Ventura?"

I've never had any occasion to call upon their support. My thoughts are "What issue is Chris having that he needs to contact PA support about?"

I'm more than a little curious about what tech support issue(s) you're having with a Plugin Alliance product. I have a rather large collection of them myself....

Happily, using SSL's ASIO driver isn't the "workaround," it's best practice, so good on ya for finding that solution.

?‍♂️ "FL ASIO" is another WDM-to-ASIO wrapper like ASIO4ALL. From the FL Studio documentation: "If your audio device does not natively support ASIO, the FL Studio install includes FL Studio ASIO and ASIO4ALL...." In other words, if your audio device does support ASIO, as in an ASIO driver made by the company that produces the device, don't use FL ASIO or ASIO4ALL." And if it doesn't, WASAPI Exclusive is a better option than ASIO4ALL or "FL ASIO" or "Magix Low-Latency driver" or whatever other color of lipstick they've put on the pig. In the case of an SSL audio interface, yes, the best driver will be the SSL ASIO driver. And really, the only time to even use WASAPI is with a computer's built-in audio CODEC chip (usually Realtek), because nobody should ever buy an interface for use with a DAW that doesn't have its own native ASIO driver. If you want your different Windows programs to be able to use the interface at the same time, then WASAPI Shared is the right driver mode.

A DAW that requires fiddly tuning, a specially built and optimized computer system, and a "tiptoeing around" workflow, when similar projects don't need any of that in competing DAW's is a DAW that's losing the race. And the payware race is much less forgiving than the freeware race. Cakewalk does what I want it to, but I don't use other DAW's enough to make a comparison in regard to engine performance. None of them challenge my system in its current state. I will say that when I first started using Cakewalk, 5 years ago, the engine did a lot of stopping. Coming from Mixcraft, which would just gradually start to have pops and crackles when I overloaded it, this was weird. I'd never used a piece of software that had an "engine" that would abruptly stop, announce that it had stopped, and then needed to be restarted like a lawnmower or outboard. And this happened a lot, so I stuck with Mixcraft and took a wait-and-see approach. If I had been evaluating SONAR Professional against other software in that price range, it would have been eliminated straightaway. Fortunately that paid off, as Noel apparently started working on engine efficiency like it was a cure for cancer and even by the second update it had improved a great deal. I used to be able to get it to stop just by adjusting the location of the loop markers while playback was running. It could handle about 2 relocations, then it would fall on its *****. Over the years, I've found Cakewalk's optimization options to be needlessly obtuse. The documentation usually describes what the benefits might be and just says to back off if it causes "trouble." What I would like to see, at least in the documentation, are descriptions of what the advantages and possible disadvantages of changing those settings might be. I suspect that a lot of them were created when having two cores and 8GB of RAM was a top end system. So if the disadvantage of adding extra plug-in buffers or whatever is that it eats up more memory, I don't care. My system has 16GB and rarely gets to the point of using over half of it. Likewise with cores. The documentation refers to having a multiple core system or not. Nobody who's using Cakewalk doesn't have at least 2 cores and probably 4 virtual cores to play with. My system weighs in at 10/20. Does that mean that I should be using model 3? If so, could there be a system profiler utility like many games have that surveys the users' system hardware and makes performance suggestions? Playback and recording I/O buffer size? I have no idea. The docs don't say what the drawbacks might be, so I don't know how high I can crank them. If as I said earlier it just uses more memory, I have way more of that than my projects usually need. So, I'd like to see better default settings out of the box that take into account systems that people are likely to have in 2023. A profiler would be the next better choice, with the best being the adaptive thing that @Misha suggests. "You need to learn how to use a DAW or go buy a different interface" helps nothing and comes off as condescending. I've been giving CbB a lot of slack over the past 5 years because it was freeware. But now that Cakewalk Sonar is going to be trying to compete in the payware world with such competitors as Studio One Artist at $99, REAPER at $60, Mixcraft at $79, they're going to have to up their game. People who step up and point out how they think things could be improved, especially in comparison to other DAW's, should be encouraged. I've heard people say that it's so hard to compare performance between two DAW's, but I disagree. Start with a project on the DAW that's having dropout problems. If it has audio, drop the audio tracks into the competing DAW. If it has MIDI, transfer that. Then put all the plug-ins on. If they don't use internal plug-in managers, twiddle their settings (doesn't have to be exact) and hit play. It's not trying to create a masterpiece mix in the other DAW, just seeing how it handles a similar load.

I've bought several replacement laptop batteries. Always from Amazon, always made in China. I'm not sure what Amazon UK's policies are, but in the US, they have a pretty good return policy. I've yet to have a problem with any laptop batteries purchased in this way. Amazon has another advantage in that you can look at user reviews.

On my i7-3770 system (similar to Mark's), I found that when I had Console or PRV on a second monitor, sometimes when I switched back and forth, I'd get slower redraws. It didn't really affect my use of the software, it just led to a janky feeling, like I was trying to get more out of it than it was really capable of. When the i7-3770 came out, I suspect that performance wasn't a big thing for Intel with the integrated graphics, more just a way to make systems cheaper for business users. In subsequent generations, Intel have really upped their game on integrated graphics, so I'm not surprised that the UHD770 graphics would be great at 2D applications like video editing. My current system has no integrated GPU to test against, the CPU was targeted to hardcore workstation users who would have high end nVidia Quadros. But in general, with the trailing edge hardware I tend to use, a secondary discrete GPU makes a big difference. Also I do play some lower-requirements non-AAA games and it's nice to be able to crank the video quality up to ultra.

Not in my opinion. The UI's have a similarity (which I like), but only ANIMATE is similar in function to something you might find from Soundspot, a multifunction widget to "pump up" your track/mix. The rest of the line features a bunch of analysis tools and what seem to be iZotope-ish mixing/mastering tools. They'd also have to go on sale every 6 months for 1/4 list price, which they don't (unfortunately, because I wouldn't mind updating my version of EXPOSE). LEVELS is on every custom template of mine. The flat, neon-on-black animated UI, the "instant recipe"/"I don't know how it works but it makes it sound better" design philosophy, the deep discount pricing structure, those were the similarities that I was referring to. Although WA Production has plenty of products that don't fit that description, they have several that do. BTW, it was with a Soundspot plug-in that I noticed that due to their not using OpenGL to offload animations to the GPU, some of those pretty animations are expensive in terms of processing. Not all of their stuff is like that. The answer to the topic title is probably "we should have started staying away from Soundspot around the time W.A. Production hit the scene." Cyclone is still nice if you're into mid/side compression because it puts all the controls and metering on the front page, and it leaves no parameters out. Attack, release, knee, gain, saturation, threshold, meters, everything's right there X2. The parameters can be locked to each other or used independently (which is how I use it, in mid/side mode). That and Voxbox are about the only SoundSpot products I still use.

Congratulations! The upgrade with the biggest impact is going from a spinning drive to an SSD for your system and projects. In recent months I've taken systems with as old as a Core 2 Duo in them and made them run acceptably, even for a little bit of audio recording, just by swapping in an SSD for their spinny system drives. My main system is an i7-6950K with 16G of RAM, and yeah, it can handle anything I throw at it, with aplomb. The Core 2 Duo system with 4G of RAM (maxed out!) was less perky, sure, but it wasn't agonizingly slow. No way was it going to handle a DAW project with more than 8 audio tracks and a handful of plug-ins, but for web browing, lightweight office stuff, it was fine. The difference, for me, these days once you pass the SSD barrier, the difference that a newer more powerful system will make isn't so much in general perceived speed of the computer system, it's in how complex a video or audio project or game you can run on it. And there are plenty of games from a dozen years ago that still look great and run great on older systems. Portal, which I think has great graphics, lists Core 2 Duo as a minimum system requirement.

Soundspot has a few gems, but nothing that you can't get elsewhere for free or cheap. They've always been kind of a weird company. Missing manuals on the website, no contact info. W.A. Production is kind of the "new and improved" Soundspot. They have deep discounts, appeal to fledgling producers and have cool-looking GUI's. The quality of the processing is typically better, too.