Starship Krupa

Really? To quote David Byrne, "How do I work this...." Oh, I see. In the Arranger Inspector. Boy howdy, that is some powerful stuff!

I've been reading the July issue of Computer Music. The topic for this month is arranging. They have a list of "tried and tested arrangement tips" and one that caught my eye was "skip cycle." It's a way to have the DAW skip over a section of the project on playback (possibly on render as well, but I've never used a DAW that had the function). They present this as a quick way to audition a pared down arrangement, but I can see it having other applications as well. My idea for a handy way to add this to Cakewalk is to enable it in the Arranger. Select an arranger section, and in the existing context menu, there can be a checkbox for "skip on playback." Of course there can also be an assignable keystroke. It would have an advantage over the mentioned DAW's in that the user could have multiple Arranger sections set to skip. It would provide a quick way to see if a section is "working" in the song, etc.

I did check out the specs before ordering it, and I, too saw the rotational speed stated to be 0 RPM. That fooled me as well. I just went back and checked and there's nothing to indicate that it's a spinner. The only clue to the technology is the 0 RPM. Of course the "default" still assumes spinner, but nowhere in the specs or in the listing says "HDD." The only clue to its actual technology is that it's listed on the site under "External Hard Drives." I'm about to move and have to pack away my tower computers and network server, which I keep a lot of stuff on, so having a small bus-powered portable external HD is useful and WD is a reliable brand.

You could also at least double the RAM. With 4G in it, it's needlessly hindering performance. If you want to do anything more than web browsing and watching video, you should have at minimum 8G.

Nobody said we "can't." The topic title refers to best practice, not "perfectly acceptable practice."

I'd like to point out for anyone interested that this product is not an SSD. It's a 5400 RPM spinner. I only noticed after I ran Crystal Disk. I'll probably keep it because $60 is still not a terrible price on an external drive (which I currently have a need for), but it's not what the thread title says it is.

Snagged the last one in my local store!

We have an ally at Microsoft in Pete Brown, who is a Cakewalk user and has posted here on this forum. Microsoft are aware of the needs of people who use Windows to make music and video. What can make Windows suffer for creative pursuits is when they load it down with security stuff so that the stupidest bozo in a given corporate installation can use their Windows computer without running the risk of bringing the whole thing down by downloading malware. As a careful computer user, I do resent my OS being tailored to needs of the most clueless. Which is why I eventually sprung for Windows Pro licenses, which at least allow you to turn some of that crap off if you want to.

Full disclosure: I currently I have very little social life except online, which is one reason I'm not that bummed to be moving away from the San Francisco Bay Area. Not that I'm blaming the location, necessarily, but this place has changed a lot demographically in the past 10 years. In the past 5 years I went from having 3 close friends in the small town where I live to having a few "see you once or twice a year" friends in the entire region. It's not a place where boho types who prioritize creativity over income can afford to move to anymore. My friends move away and they don't come back. And new potential friends can't afford to move here either. More power to younger folks who want to have solid, serious careers and raise their families, but it ain't where I am. And yes, I am experienced in writing love letters. ? Damn lot of good it's done me. ? So it's a way to be a (I hope) useful part of a community, which is a basic human need (with exceptions).

If you are reluctant to configure something to your taste because at some future date you could possibly forget how you did it, aren't you sacrificing years of convenience for the sake of avoiding a possible bit of confusion (resolved with a forum search)? We've been over this ground before, at least I have. I've requested a couple of times that Cakewalk read VST3 format presets from the disk when they happen to be installed by the plug-in's installer in the canonical locations as specified by Steinberg. Which it already sort of does, but it only displays them in the "VST3" menu where you must load them individually, one at a time, rather than easily browsing them as with the integrated Cakewalk Preset Manager. With presets for VST3's, we're really talking about three different cases. First is when the plug-in itself has its own preset management system. For instance MeldaProduction and Unfiltered Audio. Those are out of the scope of this solution. I've never seen a plug-in with a proprietary preset manager use the other two types. Second is when there are presets encoded within the plug-in's DLL (the DLL of a VST3 has the extension ".VST3") in compliance with the VST spec. Cakewalk can read and display them in its Preset Manager. This was more common back with VST2's, but is still supported if the VST3 in question uses that part of the VST spec. Pretty rare these days, really. Third is what we're discussing here: where the plug-in installer installs a folder containing files with the extension ".vstpreset" that comply with the VST3 spec. There are a few companies who do it this way in lieu of having their own plug-in manager, most notably the brainworx and Lindell-developed plug-ins. These presets are the ones that you see when you load a preset from the Cakewalk "VST3" menu. It does not, despite appearing to in a couple of cases, automatically import presets from any of these locations to its own Preset Manager. If there are .vstpreset files in the canonical locations and their names show up in the Cakewalk Plug-in manager, either the manufacturer is using both the second and third methods or a user has put them in. A plug-in, if the developer chooses, may use any combination of the above (or none) to deal with presets. The Lindell T-100 is one of the few that does this. Also Millenia NSEQ. Is all that clear? The following are the canonical VST3 preset locations, from the VST3 spec, by type: User: [Users/$USERNAME/Documents]/VST3 Presets/$COMPANY/$PLUGIN-NAME/ (this is the location Cakewalk uses if you save a preset from the VST3 menu) User_Factory: [Users/$USERNAME/AppData/Roaming]/VST3 Presets/$COMPANY/$PLUGIN-NAME/ Shared_Factory: [ProgramData]/VST3 Presets/$COMPANY/$PLUGIN-NAME/ App_Factory: [$APPFOLDER]/VST3 Presets/$COMPANY/$PLUGIN-NAME/ What we want is to get these third type VST3 spec presets to show up in Cakewalk's internal Preset Manager, which is easier to use, may be quickly browsed, etc. The brute force way to do it is to load them one at a time from the VST3 menu and then save them by name in the Cakewalk Preset Manager. I used to do this while watching TV. It's what I call "bashing" them in. Less tedious is to use a Windows scripting program to perform the same operations. This is harder to set up and get working of course, as it requires programming something to emulate precise mouse movement, etc. I got the one Steve and I worked out to function correctly about 2 out of 3 tries. Easiest of all is to let someone else handle the bashing or script babysitting. To do this, they must first get the presets in to the Cakewalk Preset Manager by whatever means, then use the Cakewalk Plug-in Manager to export the Cakewalk Preset Manager presets for import on the target system. It would be best if Cakewalk could do the importing automatically. It obviously knows where to look for .vstpresets as it displays them in the VST3 menu.

Just go to the topic I linked to and follow the instructions. We figured it out. There are .SPP files there that you can import using Plug-in Manager. Between all of us, I think we covered all but a few PA products and a couple others, like McDSP. No copying files around, no registry editing, just download the .SPP's and import them.

If you seek the opinions of heavy hitters in the realm of sample libraries, get over to VI Control and read some threads, ask some questions. I think the place started as being oriented toward use of sample libraries and expanded from there. Heaven knows the MeldaProduction stuff in general is not for everyone. Vojtech doesn't market them as such. He's in a niche outside "the most authentic recreation of console X, complete with drifting resistors," "put this mystery plug-in on for fast results," etc. Much of it is for people who want to be able to get under the hood and like to tinker. I don't always want to get under the hood. I don't even usually want to when it comes to mixing FX. Despite having leveraged my referral codes and sale purchases all the way up to MComplete, I only regularly use about 10% of the product line. Once I had MFreeFX, MEssentials and MMixingFX I had all the MeldaProduction stuff I wanted. I think his stuff sounds really good, and it's some of the sippiest on resource usage, which helps me hang on to my trailing edge computer hardware that much longer. And I really respect tight coding. His responsiveness to bug fixing is top notch, up there with Acoustica. As a drummer, you'll understand what I mean when I say that MCompressor is the Ludwig Acrolite of compressors. Workhorse, no frills, sounds great, might be the first one you ever use, but it might also be the last one. I was surprised when I posted in a thread about MeldaProduction over on VI Control and mentioned that MCompressor was the compressor that most helped me unlock the mysteries of compression, because of the informative dynamics display with the moving line. Prior to that I was just copying settings from tutorials and hoping for the best. A number of others chimed in to say that they, too had the same experience. MCompressor triggered their lightbulb moment with compression. If I had to pick a desert island compressor, it would probably come in second to MDynamics, but only second. Contrary to MeldaProduction's (deserved) reputation for complexity and initial opacity, MCompressor is very intuitive, just the right amount of controls (with the notable exception of a mix knob, but that can be worked around), and that amazing display. There are others in the FreeFX bundle that are as easy to operate and characteristically powerful, like MTuner, MMetronome, MStereoscope, MAnalyzer, MOscillator, MNoiseGenerator, and MEQualizer. I watched the YouTube video for the PA equivalent of MSpectralPan and the products are about comparable. If MEqualizer and MCompressor were products that sold for $50 each, they would be among the most highly regarded and recommended. There are deeper features in MCompressor that took me years to stumble across, like the detector pre-EQ and the (amazing at this price point) draw-your-own compression curves. Try switching it to M/S mode and listening to the results. And despite the buttload of saturation plug-ins that I've tried, MEqualizer's saturation knob is still my favorite for that kind of sweetening. It's the only (non-Melda) EQ I've come across that does what it does with harmonics, which is so useful and powerful when making sounds cooperate in a mix, taming cymbal ping, etc. The automatic band soloing is also useful. If you can handle sonible's EQ's, MEQualizer will be no problem, and has features not present in sonible's (or iZotope's). So, my recommendation is that in their next 50% off sale, use @Brian Walton's referral code and the newsletter sign-up bonus to upgrade the FreeFX bundle for about $11 cash. Gets rid of the nag strip at the bottom and opens up some extra features. And it's probably all the MeldaProduction product you'll ever want or need. More, even.

Finally, 91 Logic Pro tutorials?

But is there a minimum purchase?

Right on. I misunderstood your topic title, I took it that you had been under the impression that Cakewalk tutorials were in short supply. I guess Groove 3 are heavy hitters in the recording tutorial business?

I know, I declared a moratorium on mixing plug-ins, but gee, five bucks and it was an Unfiltered Audio plug-in that I didn't already have.... Unfiltered Audio's Zip, not only a mixing effect but a compressor of all things, as if I don't have dozens of them. Oh well, I bought four candy bars the other night at the market and it was $10 and I've eaten the candy bars already. So it's cheap fun by comparison.

I think we've discovered almost 20 YouTube channels that have Cakewalk tutorial content and that's just the ones we know about.

Well, actually, Cakewalk forumites came to the rescue! I was just now thinking that people who mostly stick to the Coffee House/Deals forums might not have seen this, and here's the perfect opportunity. Together, some of us (special thanks to @MimoJP ) figured how to export and import the presets that Cakewalk displays in the plug-in UI (Cakewalk's Preset Manager, not to be confused with Plug-In Manager). It began with the Sonitus suite and then expanded to Plugin Alliance. Once someone has bashed all of the PA (or other company's) .vstpresets into the Cakewalk system, that person can use Plug-In Manager to export them for others to import. Steve Cook (with a little QA help from me) came up with a way to bash them in with a Windows script, but it's slow and requires babysitting, so he's not sharing it for general use. The GREAT NEWS is that between doing it manually and via the scripting software, we managed to cover almost all PA plug-ins. I still need to upload the .SPP file for Masterdesk True Peak. Unfortunately the topic was started in the forum for Templates since there is no sub forum for Preset Manager presets. I put a link to it in the ProChannel Preset sharing forum. ENJOY!!

Since there is no subforum for sharing presets from the Cakewalk Preset Manager (for plug-ins other than ProChannel), the topic for sharing them started in the Templates subforum. It might be better to continue it here, maybe not, but at least there's a link to it here.

As long as you're reasonably happy with the cans (they are well-respected), and by "flaking," you meant that the earpads are worn, get a set of velour replacement earpads and spend the rest on whatever mic you're interested in. It surprises me how often helpful people neglect to ask "what kind of music/instruments are you mixing/recording? Are you using the cans for tracking and/or mixing?" It looks like you're mixing on the cans, so the important thing is to have a set of headphones that you like to listen to for long periods of time and are familiar with. The first will help with the second. You want to know how great mixes sound on whatever repro system you're using, so listen to everything on those cans. You apparently have $500 to spend on this. On its own, the Slate M-1 is "just" a large diaphragm condenser mic. The VSL system is a package of mic modeling software that's matched to the M-1. I would think of these as two separate things that are part of a bundle. If you want a new mic and you want mic modeling software, you can buy this package, but there are other options available. Unlike most bundles, this one seems like they are charging more than what you might pay for a mic of similar quality and a similar software suite. Disclosure: I have little interest in mic modeling; my strategy is to get the best (used) mics my budget will allow, get the best capture possible with them, then process that with the (quite extensive) array of software tools I have. I'm skeptical about the technology. If you think that it's a substitute for actually owning any of these illustrious and expensive classic mics, I suspect otherwise, because in addition to the things that software can model, microphones just respond differently to different levels, different placement, etc. I hate to be "that guy," but if you want to expand your palette of mic sounds, it might be more useful to put some time into figuring out how to position the one you own and treating your room to get the sound you want. No mic is going to sound optimal if it's being used in a suboptimal way in a suboptimal space, and a pretty lowly mic can sound excellent in the right context and environment. You don't have a room that's going to be much good for recording anything unless you set up some treatment. Even some foam on the walls to kill the bright reflections helps. If I were to go this route, I would be more inclined to get a mic that I really liked the sound of and then buy a separate software package. There are multiple standalone mic modeling software packages on the market. Others may chime in with what they think are the best ones. IK Multimedia has Mic Room, Antares has Mic Mod, Mic Mod is $150, Mic Room is $50. I would rather have a $350-450 mic and one of these packages, but that's just me. I'm not the best person to recommend vintage emulations. I'm just not that into them. I think I regularly use about 3 plug-ins that are emulations of vintage gear, the T-Racks 670, SPL Vitalizer, and bx_B15n. As a rule (to be broken at will!) I'd rather have modern technology that can do what was best about the vintage gear than I would modern technology that is trying to imitate the compromises made back in the day. This is a viewpoint that is currently out of fashion in the audio engineering world, I think. I'll just do my music and wait for the inevitable "it has that classic mid 21st century In The Box sound" fad. So find the best possible mic for your ears and your needs. I like diversity. Depending on what you want to record, that could be a small diaphragm condenser or a classic dynamic (Shure SM57, SM7, Sennheiser MD421, Electro Voice RE-20 or perhaps a Beyer or more modern Sennheiser). I can't say because I don't even know what source(s) you are recording. That will give you the widest array of sounds, and you can still use Mic Mod/Room software on the AT 2050.

Do they? I'm not sure which dialogue you mean. When adding tracks, I either use the button above the Track Headers or right click on or below the track headers, both of which give me what I think you are referring to as the "new option." There's a different dialogue that I see if I select Insert/Soft Synth. I only use that if I want to make a Synth Track without any MIDI (neither a simple nor "split" Instrument). It does look like it uses an earlier framework than the Add Track button or right click menu. I don't think I've ever used the "+" sign in the Synth Rack except once to see what it did. I never run with the Synth Rack visible and didn't even know what it was for until I had been using Cakewalk for many months. I thought it was odd to have a separate list of soft synths stuck down under the plug-in Browser. I guess it goes back to before there were Synth Tracks and Instrument Tracks?

I once had a weird routing issue that seemed to have to do with a plug-in that communicated with another instance of itself. What cleared it was removing the suspect plug-in, then doing a Save As under another name. I even put the same plug-in back on (in an effort to create a bug report) but it behaved the second time around. So that's my suggestion: pull any track plug-ins off your vocal track, Save As, then open the renamed project and see if the issue persists.

I can tell you I struggled with figuring out the different modes, Comping, Overwrite, and Sound on Sound! I even asked for help with it on the old forum and still couldn't get a clear picture. I finally figured it out by doing some tests. I can also say that what we call Comping mode is either the default or even the only mode in every DAW I've tried. It was the existence of Overwrite and Sound on Sound that threw me for a loop (no pun intended). And I'm impressed by how songs come to you so fully-formed. I used to think that I was somehow inadequate or inauthentic because it doesn't work that way for me, I bat ideas around like a kitten with a ball of yarn until I get something that jells. Some of us are Albert Bierstadts, some of us are Jackson Pollocks, some of us are Andy Warhols. Once I became more experienced, I realized how The Beatles wrote their songs in pieces. Paul would have been working on one part, John another, and they'd stick them together. "A Day In The Life" is one example. Paul's later "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is another obvious and notable example. I count at least three independent song snippets in that one. I watched Get Back, the Beatles documentary, and they would sit around in the studio and noodle and stitch things together. It's odd, because listening to their catalog, it sounds like they started out with more fully-formed ideas on the early records and then (d?)evolved into the piecemeal methodology. Maybe after they fried their brains on pot and acid! Watched an interview with Brian Wilson, who said that he would have loved to have had Pro Tools back in the day so that he could have more easily pieced together songs like "Good Vibrations." I've been taken aback when finding out how much of some of my favorite more recent songs turn out to have been stitched together from samples! A notable case is Daft Punk's "Digital Love." I thought it was inspired by all these older songs, turns out that the bulk of it was older songs (the badass fake synthesizer guitar solo was original, at least). Sometimes I'm reminded of John Godfrey Saxe's famous aphorism about sausages and the law: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." But the truth is, it doesn't "cease to inspire respect" in me, although it may change the flavor of the respect. I contend that if it sounds good and moves my heart (and/or booty), it is good.

Am I the only one who noticed that it looks like he's not working with audio, but with MIDI? Or do I have that wrong? They work differently in Cakewalk, in some important ways. It's just another signpost on the race to the bottom. This "comping" thing came about because sometimes an entire take isn't considered "bad," maybe one clammed note or a flubbed lyric that may be "good" in a different take. So what the engineer does then is substitute the bad note or lyric with the same one sung correctly in the other take. You can do it with instruments as well. Seems icky, like taking the one rotten egg out of a carton and putting a fresh one in its place. It's one of many talent substitutes that exist today. I'm sure that pros like you guys can nail complete takes in your sleep, but to be honest, for duffers like me (and Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac on their Rumours album and Tom Scholz of Boston on their first LP), we need every crutch we can find. I've even heard about finicky, indecisive so-called "talent" who record multiple takes and then can't decide which one sounds better and want to come back and decide the next day or, ugh, hear it "in context." If one of the takes doesn't stand out, they should just wipe them all and do it right! Don't want to gross you out, but I've even heard of unscrupulous engineers letting their "singers" do stuff like recording a verse at a time, doing the chorus or bridge isolated from the rest, then stitching it all together, and even abominations like copying their favorite performance of the chorus and pasting it multiple times! These abominable practices supposedly originated back when people recorded to tape, and computer recording has just made it easier, to the point where they've made this stuff the "default." You can't fight it any more than you can fight the software coming with a connection of pre-recorded musical "loops" that are intended to be strung together as "songs." I even heard of something the other day called "Band-in-a-Box," which sounds appropriate for something that sounds like it kills creativity. Band-in-a-Box-And-Lowered-Into-The-Earth is what it should be called!

In addition to Unlimited, which I really like, another free solution is Limiter-Z by LVC Audio. D16 also make a freebie adaptive limiter called Frontier. I count at least 4 possible no-cost solutions, at least one of which I can personally vouch for. No need to either suffer with one that's not working properly or spend any money.