Starship Krupa

Hello fellow Generation Joneser. B. 1961 myself, which, in keeping with the topic, makes me a "sexugenarian." I'm going through some major upheaval in my life right now and it's good to hear from someone coming out the other side of changes in an improved state. Merry Evenings Define Success!

Yes! How could 6 different development teams all make the same decisions as to how to mix audio files together? To render them? I'm actually in the middle of setting up a listening test using a pair of virtual instruments playing arpeggio patches. I'm hoping that it will allow me (and others) to do some testing of subjective listening quality. I was just messing about keeping my chops up with my secondary DAW, Mixcraft and noticed a difference between how the same two synths playing overlapping arps sounded in relation to how the same dataset sounded in Cakewalk. The plan is to expand the testing to other DAW's I have access to like Ableton Live Lite and Studio One Artist 5. Apparently I was the only one who got the joke about your vocals sounding crappy. Practical hint on that, though: your voice is an instrument just like the others you play. What makes your playing get better? Practice. Same with singing. The more I practice, the better my pitch and overall confidence and performance. Record your vocal part as many times as you can stand to over a number of days. Record, listen to the take, repeat.

Are you attempting to drag a plug-in from the Plug-In Browser and drop it on a track? If so, are you dropping it somewhere on a clip in the track or onto the FX bin in the Track Header? Those operations will have different results.

So many available, even for free:

Based on what evidence? I know we all want this to be true due to the can of worms we'd be facing otherwise. If you have a credible source of information I would love to know what it is.

This is, unfortunately, a question that only the developers of the respective programs could answer definitively and objectively. From a user's perspective, all we can do is test it. Make a couple of small mixes using no plug-ins, and/or simple plug-ins using the same fader and plug-in settings. Then render the projects and listen. There are those end users who will tell you that "all DAW's sound the same, period," because they knew a guy who knew a guy who read on a forum that someone tried a null test of unknown parameters and source audio and it nulled perfectly. Presumably the fictional person ran this test on every DAW currently on the market. I can say that I ran null tests a few years ago using sine waves as source material (not even a great test because it leaves out transients), with Cakewalk and Mixcraft as the DAW's under test and they didn't null. They weren't terribly far apart, but at least at the panning settings I used, no FX, the render wasn't identical. In the meantime we have advertising material from different DAW's (including Samplitude/Music Creator and Mixcraft) touting how they improved the sound of their respective audio engines. You see why I am personally skeptical of the "all DAW's sound exactly alike" statements. I might go as far as saying that it's likely that at the task of recording whatever audio is coming in from the interface, you'll get the same results. However, as soon as you start creating mixes, that's when a whole lot of proprietary algorithms for mixing and panning and interfacing with plug-ins enter the picture. You did say "noticeable." That's subjective. Who's doing the listening and noticing? Experienced trained listeners? What programs and hardware are they using to play it back and listen? Audio player software for computers varies widely in sound quality. There are so many variables that the only way to get satisfactory answers, IMO, is to set up some tests ourselves and listen.

Wow, right from the very start: "this software uses Windows 3.1 features which are ignored by Cakewalk's main rivals." and "If you click the right mouse button on a bar, Cakewalk presents you with a choice of editors for altering the information within that section of the track. Cakewalk was using right click context menus as early as their first release for Windows 3.1. Dang. I've been a fan of context menus from the first release of Windows 95. That's when they, uh, really started to click for me.

Holy crap, Peter!! This sounds excellent! So much improvement in the mixing, instrument separation, vocal sound. If there's one thing I'd change, and it's pretty small in the huge scope of this piece, it would be to "dirty up" a couple of the instrument sounds, and maybe use a touch of delay to nestle them down in the rest of the mix. This would be the Rhodes (?) sound at the beginning and the electric guitar lead around the end of the first chorus. The rest of the song, the arrangement, the treatment of the vocals, man, you sound like you're on a TV special tribute to Jeff Lynne. And: Wasn't that what I said about "I Am The Walrus?" Ross agrees, you have a cool, distinctive voice. For perspective, I think my singing voice sounds like a middle school principal reading the lunch menu on a day when they're especially bored with the task.

Of course for MAddicts who would like to someday get any bundle that includes MVibratoMB, this is a good principle financially. At upgrade time, Melda applies 50% of the list price of any plug-in purchased from a retailer (they assume you got a discount, and it's also an encouragement to buy direct). So in this case, since MVibratoMB lists for $43, your $9 eventually gets you $21 in upgrade credit. I had a policy of buying any MeldaProduction product that went on sale for under $10, and took advantage of a few intro sales. These added up to big savings on the way to the bundles I got during the 50% off everything sales. Including of course the Mother Of All Bundles. And BTW, when those bundles/everything go on sale at 50%, if you own any Melda licenses, always check your bundle upgrade prices. I was always surprised by how little the upgrade cost was. Those freebies, $9 specials and intro deals really add up. Yeah, there's also the basic original MRotary to confuse matters further. I think the MVintageRotary may add saturation and cab simulation? It can be puzzling to figure out what is what when there's (for instance) MReverb, MReverbMB, MTurboReverb, and MTurboReverbMB. Here's how I understand it, after having been perplexed for a good long time: "Turbo" means "Deluxe" or "Advanced" and sometimes "Vintage modeled." In the case of these reverbs, the difference is that the "Turbo" version has the feature where you can design your own algorithms. ? I have no idea who the target market for that level of customization is. More power to them (so to speak). The underlying algorithms in the stock presets for MTurboReverb sound better (to my ears it's the equal of any reverb I've heard). There are so many different "devices" (more about that later) and variations within the devices that I will likely never, unless I end up doing prison time where I get to have my laptop, even have time to audition all of them. The Turbo ones have more "devices," which is where they've taken various controls and grouped them together and put a more conventional GUI face on them. These grouped controls are what MeldaProduction calls "multiparameters." Confused the hell out of me for years until I finally figured it out: "multiparameters" are just controls that are tied together and may be operated with a single slider. The "devices" take those and use skeuomorphic knobs instead of the sliders. Skeuomorphic buttons to select different algorithms and such. Nice for people who like the way the MeldaProduction stuff sounds but are put off by the complexity and look of the UI's. Wow, that's a new one (to me). I wonder what his problem is with that. Unlike Steinberg, MAGIX, Avid, Waves, Apple, Microsoft, etc. I've never heard anyone say that Image-Line does evil (not that I'm saying any of the aforementioned companies do evil). Of course, it seems like no matter what their policies, any company can raise the ire of any individual. I've seen people rail against MeldaProduction's upgrade policies. They can seem weird at times; in the last go-around, the cost for me to upgrade to one of their bundles was about $400, where upgrading to the MComplete bundle (everything they have made or ever will make) was $120. But who cares? It's not as if they were trying to cheat me somehow. They credit for license purchases that are part of the bundle. Since every product is part of the MComplete bundle, well, of course, I got credit for every single thing I already had. But I've seen people just fume over that.

I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet since I leveraged up to MComplete. If you want to try it out, you can download the MeldaProduction installer and demo any product you want for 15 days. Just take care to only install the one(s) you want to demo, because the clock starts ticking as soon as you install a plug-in. After that time, you'll periodically get either a silence or noise burst (can't remember which).

You have to have a job in order to be afraid of it being taken away.

Is your setup working with n-Track and Audacity?

Heck yeah. Playing vs. programming. Not that one is inherently "better' than the other.

Wow, thank you so much, @JnTuneTech. This gives me a lot to chew on. It also makes me ponder whether this functionality could be amended/expanded for the benefit of the VSTi's that are probably in the majority these days. Not sure yet what to ask for, though.

A true Brit, he.

I've been spending more time with the documentation. Unfortunately, none of it is helping. I feel even more puzzled. What I'm trying to do is make custom names show up in place of the piano keys, to be used with MDrummer. I would like to start with the stock GM Drums because most of the assignments are the same, I'd just need to change some of them. Should this be done with a text editor? Should it be done in the Define Instruments and Names dialog? If "text editor" is the answer, what file do I edit? Another question. While poring over the documentation, it finally came to me that all this instrument definitions stuff seemed to be really oriented toward using external hardware synths, not VSTi's. How much of it is applicable to VSTi's? Bonus question: I tried making a MIDI track with no synth associated, with its output set to be the input of my MIDI interface, and I set it to Ch. 10, which I had set in "Add Instrument Definitions" to General MIDI Drums. Some interesting things happened, like the notes in PRV turned diamond-shaped instead of rectangular. I kinda liked it. Is there some way to make that happen for a soft synth?

Max, Lewis, Fernando. World champions all, great to seem them all on the podium last race. Nice tribute.

There are some excellent sounds here.

So I'm not the only one around here who fantasizes about attending the Monaco Grand Prix. Nice. I checked out maybe going to the Vegas GP this year, but it sold out of its (expensive!) tickets pretty quickly. I'm working on a song called "Grand Prix Weekend" that has a little tribute to Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Girls." I have a sample of David Croft saying "Lando Norris goes 'round the outside!" (round the outside, round the outside).

Very nice.

Yikes. I hope there was a nice pop screen between the talent and that poor C12!

I've become resigned to the fact that I'll have to clean up after some installers, ones that install AAX and so forth. To me, at least, the T-Racks products I have licenses for are worth the trouble of moving the ones I don't have licenses for. Especially their Fairchild 670 emulation.

If what you're concerned with is not having Cakewalk scanning unnecessary demo plug-ins from a bundle and then displaying them in the Browser, you can delete (or move to an unscanned folder) the DLL's (including the .VST3 DLL's). I do this with IK Multimedia T-Racks, which installs every T-Racks plug-in regardless of which ones you have licenses for. I have a folder named TRacks and just drag the .VST3 files I don't want to the folder after installation. If all you care about is just not having them show up in Browser, then what abacab said about using Plug-In Manager to exclude them from view is the ticket.

Well, yes, de gustibus. Look at my favorite plug-in house, MeldaProduction, and you'll see quite a difference in approach to Waves'. That "get under the hood" thing where I can see exactly what the plug-in is doing is attractive to me. And heaven knows there are plenty of people who wouldn't touch a Melda plug-in with a ten foot pole due to the clinical UI's. It's not as if I've tried the entire Waves line, just the freebies I've snagged, which do include Hybrid Comp, RVox and RBass. Also a Chris Alge reverb thingie. An assortment of One Knob FX I'll never use. I'm newer to this than most of the people who post here, I think. I started working with a DAW again about 9 years ago. I was using Mixcraft, which comes with a load of plug-ins, and I got the MFreeFX bundle, IKM T-Racks freebies, UltraChannel, Ozone Elements and the CM suite pretty early, before I got most of the Waves stuff. So I'd already been exposed to some good processors and developed a workflow with them by the time I experienced most of the Waves things, most of which are much older than the other ones I'd been working with. They just don't do anything that other plug-ins I have don't do as well or better. Add to that the janky (and single seat; I always run at least 2 active systems, sometimes 3) licensing, and they've never made it into my rotation. MetaFilter is pretty cool, and I found a very useful novelty patch in Elements 2. But Elements is a resource hog. And if a synth is a resource hog, it better sound as good as Chromaphone. ? So I have a more limited experience with them. It might be that the ones that would blow my mind are ones that I've never tried. At this point, I many more mixing FX than I could possibly learn how to make full use of. I'm only in the market for sound design-y FX and I don't think that's really Waves' strong suit (aside from the aforementioned MetaFilter).

I'd guess that somehow it's not terminating correctly. I doubt this is the case, because I replace FX and synths like crazy and would soon overpower my system.