Starship Krupa

bx_masterdesk True Peak obtained for free. No more worries about untrue peaks.

Well, as you alluded to, I too suspect that your project is getting corrupted at some point and all subsequent weirdness stems from that. A software engineer colleague of mine described it using a “cracked windshield” metaphor. Windshield gets hit with a stone, then over months of driving, the crack spreads. But it’s all the result of that one stone. Once you see the first sign of corruption it seems like it only gets worse after that. I’m suspecting a plug-in less as you describe it more, but it is true that really bad issues with Cakewalk very often come down to plug-in conflicts. So it’s worth keeping an eye on. Serum, obviously, is a very popular synth, and if it were causing problems like this the forum and Reddit would be in flames. It’s crucial at this point to watch for the very first instance of corruption and then see if you can remember what operations you did right before it happened. QA engineers, which I used to be, maintain a mental “buffer” of actions so that they can retrace their steps. It’s a challenge, but not an impossible one. When I saw a similar thing, it was in a project with a low track count, and it involved a couple of MeldaProduction plug-ins. Melda are known for having a large amount of shared code, so that might have had something to do with it. I might have been doing some sidechaining, which could also have helped. IIRC, it did corrupt the project, but since it was a small project, I just salvaged it into a new project and the error didn’t happen again. Haven’t seen it since, so I called it a fluke. ?‍♂️

I wouldn't worry about that. They definitely don't want people to have such troubles with the software. The tough part is figuring out how to force it to happen again in such a way that they can examine it and correct the problem. I've been trying off and on for years to get the "MIDI track stops talking to Synth track" one pinned down. I started another topic just for that to see if we can work together on it. It's been happening every once in a while since I started using Cakewalk. Not often enough to cause real problems, but annoying when it does happen. Oddly enough, it tends to happen early on in a project, once I sacrifice the chicken to it, it's solid thereafter.

BTW, if anyone reading this doesn't already have the T-Racks 670 compressor and is wondering whether it is worth it....good heavens go and fill out the survey NOW. It's my favorite bus compressor. Widely considered to be the best (or one of the best) Fairchild 670 emulations. Whether it is or not I don't know, but I fell in love with the sounds it gets.

I'm starting this thread because multiple people (including @chris.r) chimed in on another one saying that we've all seen similar behavior in Cakewalk. The big problem is, while this happens regularly, it's so far been beyond my ability to make it happen reliably. The developers can't fix an issue they don't see, and the only bug report that they can use is one that lays out a series of steps they can take to reproduce the problem. The only other way is if we can send them a project that's exhibiting the issue. In this case, sending them the project might be a problem, because such is the nature of this that various stimuli can cure the condition, and one of those is (sometimes) exiting Cakewalk, relaunching, and loading the project again. My scenario: I only use "split" MIDI/Synth tracks, that is rather than an Instrument Track. What happens is that at some point the MIDI track stops being able to communicate with the Synth Track. I don't know if it happens with Instrument Tracks as well. I can usually see the meter moving on the MIDI track as the song plays, but no sound comes from the Synth track, nor does its meter show any activity. There are, in my experience, only 3 actions that can (sometimes) cure this condition. First, and easiest, in some cases I can select MIDI channel 1 on the MIDI track and the synth track will start playing again. The rest of the time, I have to create the synth track again and set the MIDI track to drive it. In the past, sometimes I could exit Cakewalk and return and the problem would have sorted itself, but I haven't done that lately. What I hope is that if enough of us look into this and report, we can figure out what sequence of events causes this to happen. @Lynn Wilson said that it only seems to happen with VST2's, which sounds familiar, because my bread-and-butter synths, XPand!2, Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, are all VST2 (as well as being from one manufacturer, AIR). It's happened a lot with KONTAKT, which until recently, was also VST2-only. So that's one place to start: when this happens, what specific synth, and is it a VST2 or VST3. Also, does it happen for you with simple Instrument Tracks, or only split MIDI/Synth, or both? Does my method of forcing Channel 1 ever fix it for you? How about exiting and relaunching?

Nice, I've done this for a few friends who haven't done much with it yet, but I figured, "you're a musician, you have a computer, let's put some music software on it." I'd encourage your friend to check out this forum for tutorials and advice. There is a subforum for posting tutorials and links to them, and it has a list of YouTube channels that are devoted to or at least have a series on, Cakewalk: As for whether to install the Studio Instruments, hey, whatever. They don't take up much space. Everyone, no matter what they're doing, needs some kind of drum machine instrument. And speaking of instruments (and FX), there are longs lists on this forum of freeware synths and FX that Cakewalk users have found and tried. Your friend might be even more enthused about moving to using a DAW if they realize that they don't have to spend a penny to get some really great stuff:

@pulsewalk already said that they've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and that the issue persists across Windows reinstalls as well. And across multiple systems, so disk or memory corruption are unlikely culprits. Pulse, I think you and the others nailed it: something happens at one point and the further errors are either the result of it and/or create further corruption. Another (former) pro software QA guy here. What Mark and Tim said about repeatable steps is crucial. If you can get a repro, the devs can fix it, and I'll say, with problems this severe, they would love to know how this is happening so they can fix it. No developer wants a user to have such a bad experience. @chris.r, same, but probably best to start your own thread. I, too, from time to time have a MIDI track stop communicating with the synth track it's associated with. Maddeningly, I can't get a reliable repro on it. Either forcing the channel of the MIDI track to 1 or deleting and recreating the synth track usually fixes it. It happens regularly, but not reliably, if you get me. With weeks between incidents. Last night it happened with XPand!2, which is a common instrument, and it happens with other synths in very small projects with no other plug-ins. So I am pretty sure that it's Cakewalk all by itself that is hiccupping. But unless the devs can also see the problem, they're helpless to fix it. I call these hard-to-repro bugs "heisenbergs" after the physicist who hypothesized that quantum events can be affected by being observed (or rather the methods used for observation....I think). They exist, but when I start looking at them, they vanish. From your description, I think I might be able to help narrow it down. We'll start with the theory that it's a conflict between a VST effect and Cakewalk. I once saw something similar to your issue, although not as disastrous, where audio from one track started playing from another completely unrelated track. Weird as hell. I chased down the offender, which was, of all things, a MeldaProduction plug-in. I say "of all things" because I use their products on everything and they are usually rock solid. Couldn't reproduce it, though, so I call it a glitch. Yes, you have a TON of plug-ins, as do we all, heaven knows. The thing to figure out is which one(s) Cakewalk is stumbling over. So first try to think of which plug-in(s) is common to all of these projects. Which of them you were likely using when the first track that got corrupted? Since one of the symptoms is unrelated tracks interacting with each other, is one of them a plug-in that communicates with another instance, such as via sidechaining? Instruments are plug-ins, too, so is this always with the same instrument(s)? Sometimes a combination of plug-ins can make the host choke. Even if the issue has nothing to do with a plug-in, there are other details that might help. How far into the project did/does this start happening? What operation were you trying to perform when you first noticed it? What was the last thing you did before you noticed it? All of these things can help figure out where the program is choking. As far as being able to salvage an already corrupted project, is there some way maybe you can create a new project, then drag the tracks to the new project? I know that would be a tedious task with 150 tracks, but it might be worth it to save a project you have so many hours of work invested in. And it might help troubleshoot.

Okay, off-topic payware diversion, but really, I don't think there's a need to follow hard and fast rules. John is comparing delays that are both payware and freeware. The next time the MEssentialsFX bundle comes around on the 50% off everything sale (which happens about 3X yearly), it comes with MTurboDelay and MTurboReverble (and 8 more that all live up to the "essentials" label). You can snag it for $135, or much less if it's your first MeldaProduction purchase and you use a referral code. And of course if you already have some of the stuff in the bundle, the price goes down accordingly. IMO, those are the last delay and reverb that I'd need to buy. If I had discovered MTurboReverble before I discovered Phoenix/Nimbus/Stratus, there would have been no need. I still have a bunch of other delays, because I'm a delay 'ho and also like weird sound-design-y ones. MTurboDelay can handle that, too. Back on topic to freebies, I understand John's desire to find a good replacement for Sonitus Delay. For one thing, the fact that it is a DX effect makes it so that you can't use it in most other hosts. When the bundled plug-ins are host-locked, I avoid them because I want my skills with them to transfer over to other hosts that I use. I make exceptions for the QuadCurve EQ because it's such a sweet feature, and most of the rest of the PC modules because they emulate common processor types. An 1176 or LA/2A clone operates pretty similarly across manufacturers. Cakewalk will continue to support DX, I'm sure, for the foreseeable future, because so many of the bundled FX are in that format. But we're already starting to see issues with TTS-1 that they can't fix because they don't have the code (they do have the code for the Sonitus Suite, though, and have in the past made small noises about porting them to VST).

? Also goes well with His Dark Materials.

If only. The registers in my brain that get accessed and overwritten a lot like "location of key ring" started to develop bad sectors as early as high school. At this point in my life, most of the "location of [item needed in everyday life]" sectors seem to be nearly shot. It's said that if you want to know what is really important to you (vs. what you say or even believe is important to you), look at the activities you spend the most time doing every day. By that criterion, what is most important to me is "looking for my other sock," "looking for my other shoe," and "looking for my phone." The phone is down in 3rd place only because it has an app that allows me to command it to beep from multiple other devices. Other life passions include "looking for something to write with," "looking for something to write on," and "looking for my reading glasses." It's good to have many things that drive you.

The places where it comes up for me are when assigning categories to plug-ins in the Browser and (especially) when assigning commands to the Control Bar's Custom Module. Even after 5 years with Cakewalk, my middle finger instinctively goes to the mouse wheel when those lists come up....and I'm a tiny bit disappointed every time. The code/Windows API that displays those lists is very old, goes back to before mouse wheels were a common thing. Long overdue for retirement.

Well, the big problem, of course, is real estate. Those controls would have to go somewhere, which would result in being able to display fewer channel strips. One of the advantages that physical mixing desks have over computer screen ones: the physical ones can be 5' wide, where my computer screen, not so much. That's why the ProChannel is such a great idea: the controls are still right there on the desk where you want them, but they get out of the way when you want to have more strips on the screen. Odd, though, I have a friend who stopped using SONAR partially because he hated the ProChannel. Aside from the fact that I think it's a great feature, gee, if someone doesn't agree they can just leave it closed, right? But he wanted the knobs and stuff that I guess used to be in the SONAR mixer strip before the ProChannel came along. The biggest enhancement I can think of for the Console View would be for the fader section to resize depending on whether the rest of the strip is occupied. There's a lot of space at the top of the strips above the Gain knob that could be used to give more throw to the faders. Also, there's not really a reason for the Sends rack to be full size when no sends are in use. I'm sure that as monitors increase in size and resolution, these things will be addressed.

If you mean the ability to adjust EQ settings without popping open ProChannel, you can already do that. Try clicking and dragging in the EQ UI with the ProChannel closed. For the rest....well, that's what ProChannel is for. It's always a click away.

The marker enhancement that I'd like to see is the option to see "tails" on them that run down then entire height of the Track View. I love the feature in Mixcraft, it makes it so much easier to line up clips and areas of a waveform (when you're trying to do manual phase alignment). Cakewalk does have the Aim Assist Line, which is awesome, but I'd still love to have those marker tails. Both are great, both together would be crazy great.

Hey, watch it, I'm a Californian! ? I like to reduce the impact on the natural environment wherever practical, I think it's good for everyone. One of the things I like about TruOil is its negligible toxicity and environmental impact. It's made from natural, renewable resources and you can wipe the stuff on with your fingers if you want to (although not recommended, it's kinda sticky). The idiocy around TruOil likely comes down to how it's distributed and marketed rather than some clueless person targeting it specifically. Someone somewhere in the supply chain had to classify it, so they put down "firearm care" or whatever, and whoosh, it's "gun paraphernalia." And therefore dangerous, OMG?. And/or possibly the retailer and/or shipping company having a policy (at the request of law enforcement or otherwise) of taking note of whoever they send anything gun related to. So they can profile people who might someday take their Mother of Tinkertoy Tele to school and start bonking people with it. A note for guitarists on further usefulness of gun paraphernalia: when I was doing amp repair, I went to a gun shop to buy TruOil for a guitar finishing project and noticed that the wire brushes used for barrel cleaning would be perfect for cleaning out dirty 1/4" amp input jacks, and output jacks on guitars. At the moment I can't recall which caliber works the best, a bit of research would do it. Remember that the sleeve diameter of those jacks is greater than 1/4". Otherwise, it's really tough to clean the sleeve. A spin with the barrel brush and contact is restored. Try it on a dirty jack and see if it helps.

Looks like the neck isn't drilled according to the instructions. They suggest you have a fretting hammer so you can tap in high frets? They should take care of that before it's shipped. Well, I suppose you don't have to buy one of their hammers. As for fret crowning files, I have a set that I got on eBay that do a decent job. Being a frugal dude, I shy from the prices that Stew-Mac charges for their tools. If I were a pro and getting paid to do it, they'd save enough time to make it worth it, but I can do a good job with what I have. I'm a cheap guitar maven, though. I have exactly one "nice" guitar, a 25-year old Martin D1. The rest are Frankencasters or distressed in some way or other. They play great because I've learned how to work on them. Perfectionism and the DIY impulse are at odds with each other (in me). I have learned to make an instrument play well, but I'll never be as good at fretwork as Gary Brawer's Plek machine. For an instrument that I wanted to be the best possible, I'd take it to Gary, have his crew put stainless steel frets in it and then put it on the Plek machine. Anything I do myself is going to come up short of that, so then it's just a matter of how short is acceptable.

That actually serves one well when doing fretwork. One reason I'd never do it as a job. I take too long with it, so it's only my guitars and friends' that I'll work on.

Yup. I've never actually checked mine against another straightedge, but I get good results with it. Flattening a piece of metal like that isn't a difficult task. They probably have a machine or two set up to crank them out by the thousands. Insert stock, cut notches, lap edge to ensure flatness. Still, do let me know if you find that yours isn't flat! If it isn't, it can itself be leveled. Perhaps in your line of work you know a machinist or two? Or if you get one of those bars, it would work as well on the straightedge as it does on the frets. Really, though, I'll bet that it'll be just fine as it is. Are you thinking of putting a color stain on first? That's a nice look. ?‍♂️ I think that's why it's so difficult to find here in Northern California. I wonder if I've wound up on some "gun nut" list for buying the stuff. Great detailed advice, @mettelus. I tried it on the second guitar I finished and would now use nothing else for a natural finish. It's just so easy and it gets such great results. I had the idea years ago to clone the stuff and market it as a guitar finish or even a general woodworking finish. As you say, the biggest part of it is linseed oil. I think they put it through a reduction process (heating in an oven with no oxygen), which is what helps it to cure quickly. I looked into it with the help of a friend of mine who is a coatings chemist. Many compounds you can learn a lot about from reading their Material Safety Data Sheet. Heck, Birchwood Casey themselves should market a guitar finish version with different packaging so that it wouldn't be associated with firearms. Not that I personally have any problem with that, but I wonder how much of it is going on gun stocks vs. musical instruments these days. Call it TruGuitar or something and sell it via musical instrument distributors. I've not gotten around to experimenting with putting dyes and pigments in it, but I thought about that as well. So many ideas, so little volition. ? The stuff is so easy to work with. Wipe it on with an old sock, let it cure for a couple of hours, repeat until it looks excellent.

I believe the Dr. goes on sale periodically. If it were anything over about $30 US, I wouldn't have bought a license. Really, for the performance meter, I just use it for comparison and trust that the scale on the left is some indication of the performance. It's the scale on the left that I think you should concentrate on when using it. And make use of the ability to load 2 plugs at once. I bet you can also figure out the Dynamics analysis. Important note: there are two modes. One applies a rising amplitude and shows the curve, the other applies a pulse and shows you an interesting graphic that makes it easy to see what it's doing as far as attack and release. Really, with the help of those two graphs, I'm pretty confident I could make approximations of a lot of "vintage" compressors using a versatile one like MCompressor, using the draw-your-own curve. One interesting thing I learned regarding MCompressor: It's not as "precise" as I thought. According to Plugindoctor, after it kicks in, its default curve goes through a change at the top end. This may contribute to how well-liked it is.

Odd coda to this tale: I just sold the ASRock motherboard on eBay for $43 plus shipping. After I gave up on it I tossed it on the pile, where it somehow got a few bent CPU socket pins, but then I remembered the "for parts only" sales on eBay and put it up there. Cuts into the cost of the replacement motherboard by almost 50%. When the i7-6800K also sells on eBay, I'll be back in the "free motherboard with CPU" zone.? The build is cruising right along with the Gigabyte board. I have to say, though, after getting used to the excellent tuning and fan control utilities on my ASUS motherboard, the stuff that comes with the Gigabyte is kinda poop. The ASUS doesn't even have an unlocked CPU in it. The Gigabyte won't let me spin the case fan down to zero, which the ASUS did. Speaking of fans, even with a passively-cooled GPU and a notoriously hot CPU, I'm running with a single case fan and the CPU and GPU temps never get above 65C when running games or benchmarks or anything. I think it's that mid tower case. I was going to put a couple of fans in it, but one seems to be more than enough.

The Dead Duck FX package has a delay, as does the Kilohearts Essentials bundle. BTW, I'm interested to know what you find out when putting Acustica plug-ins to the Plugin Doctor performance test. I tried some of their freebies many years ago, and they were such resource hogs that I've never touched them since.

So what? Who's going to consume that theoretical song? So someone can press a button and create a song. Who's going to pay to listen to it or own their own copy? If the answer is "people who would otherwise have paid for my music," well, pardon me, but if I'm putting out soulless crap that can be bested by a robot, I deserve to be put out of business. It's no skin off my nose if someone can push a button and make a song. Doesn't affect me in the slightest. I've never cared 2 plugged poops for what mainstream music consumers want. It's been almost 50 years since I gave a rat's hiney about the Billboard Hot 100. My thing in the 80's and 90's was indie labels and college radio. My deal in this century is SomaFM and Bandcamp. I have fringe-y tastes and I like it like that. So slick saccharine overproduced crap-pop can now be created entirely without human involvement? The music in the top 10 already sounds like it was created by algorithms. Why not take it all the way? Elvis. The Beatles. Disco. Punk. Rap. Synthpop. Rave. All spelled "the end of true musicianship." All were bellwethers of an imminent musical apocalypse. Doomsayers will be doomsayers.

If the responses I got on Vi Control when I mentioned that MCompressor was the compressor that lit the lightbulb of understanding about how compressors work are any indication, there are many people who had a similar experience. It's that display, with the vertical line bouncing back and forth. Simple, uncluttered, nothing that doesn't need to be front-facing. Incredibly, it's the only compressor in the Meldaproduction line that features that display without also exposing a whole bunch of other stuff. This is MDynamics, the flagship precision compressor in their lineup, as simple as I could make it: It has the display we like, but all of the stuff at the left takes up so much real estate. TurboComp is similar. I've been lobbying Vojtech off and on for years to replace or revamp or augment MModernCompressor, (aka The Forgotten Compressor) to be able to use that display instead of that distribution graph that nobody but him seems to understand. Either that or create "MCompressorDeluxe" that has the Dry/Wet control and fancy detectors from MModernCompressor and the much-loved display and ability to design your own compression/expansion curves from MCompressor. There's a spot in the MeldaProduction line for a compressor at the $50 level (one that will sell and be used more MModernCompressor).

Ah, just wait a couple of months and the upgrade price will have settled into the realm of sanity. Software companies just do this. The initial announced upgrade price is whatever they think they can get from those who must have the latest versions of everything. I get that, I used to be much more that way than I am now. I think Vegas Pro was what got me to realize that I don't necessarily need to upgrade a program that already does way more than I'll ever learn how to use. After a product like that matures, the new features are so up in the stratosphere as to be way beyond anything I'm currently doing or even likely to do in the foreseeable future. "HD video" around these parts still maxes out at 1920x1280.

Spoken like a Meldaphile. That was one of the things that made me sit up and take notice of what Vojtech was up to all those years ago (seven years it's been). He posted on the Meldaproduction forum some of his philosophy about why he wasn't interested in baking "analog mojo" into his processors. He said that if there's noise or distortion, then the processor is deliberately adding a flaw to the sound. If someone wants that, they can add noise and distortion themselves (using a couple of the freeware bundle FX), but he wasn't going to design it in. I thought that was a refreshing attitude, especially back then. Nothing wrong with hiss, flutter, distortion or whatever, but the compressor doesn't need to be the thing supplying them. I have nothing at all against vintage flaws; I bought the industry standard effect for adding hiss, rumble, wow, flutter, etc., RC-20, just so that I could make my dialog samples sound crappy. Apropos Freeware FX, Bertom EQ Analyzer is another great analysis tool. You use two instances of it, the generator and the listener. They automatically find each other and the listener displays the curve. Here's an example of it taking a look at T-Racks EQP-1A with a traditional Pultec kick drum setting: Bertom also have 3 other pay-what-you-want FX and utilities, including an "air" EQ, a stereo image tool and a multiband denoiser.