Starship Krupa

De gustibus. To me, "Perfect Kiss" is a towering anthem and I hang on every note. I've watched the video so many times I have things memorized, like where Bernard takes the cowbell solo and where you can see the Joy Division gig flier. @User 905133, the part I'm referring to regarding cowbell starts at 6:30, after Steven's frog solo. Bernard takes a lead on it, a nice, complex rhythm striking two different parts of the bell, giving it an agogo flavor. I was going to post LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" for another great cowbell solo, but I watched a live video of it and Murphy uses an agogo. I had thought he was doing like Bernard and hitting different parts of the bell. Here's the live version. Notes: holy mother of pearl THIS is how you start a live set Nancy Whang should have received a special Grammy for Best Use of Rock and Roll Hair in a Live Performance for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCbNTGCB_vg

Unfortunately, the DOJ doesn't go after companies for having extralegal spurious unenforceable clauses in contracts. It's a civil matter, not criminal, so the only way to bring the legal pain is to create something, have them make unfair use of it, and then bring suit. On the other hand, in these times, the court of public opinion is a strong weapon. What these YouTubers (and people like you) are doing: spread the word, hit them where it hurts, which is user engagement with their platform. If their platform gets a bad name, that's very hard to shake, there are others laying in wait to eat their lunch. FUD can be amazingly persistent. I think people write something off, then go on to the next solution. They carry on and don't check back in with their old platform to see if they cleaned up their act. Witness the DAW users who switch from one to the other who say they "never looked back." If Re: Purr or Stew Dio Won is working for you, why keep checking in to see if Q-Bass is worth returning to? Has everyone who fled Waves during their flirtation with subscription-only licensing trotted on back? I don't know, but I suspect not. That's why I'm sad whenever there's an eruption of toxic FUD regarding Sew Gnar, and the platform bleeds users. Fellow users are fun (and useful) to have around, and when they split, they split for good unless the product support forum includes what may be the best deal tracking subforum on the web.😋

😖 I'm glad you caught it in time. Excellent point. The EULA would have to stand up to a civil suit, which I doubt that it would. Companies put all kinds of crepe in EULA's that isn't actually defensible. They're probably just trying to see what they can get away with. I'd not be surprised if they back off once engagement with their platform starts to suffer as a result.

Whatever will be next for Next? A YouTube tutorial or two would be nice.

Really? I don't see that happening. First, for the reason you state, they've already added plenty to the program, like the stuff in the new Track Manager and the business about the free tier. Everything about the free tier notifications is via the vector UI. Resizable Console modules is only doable with the vector UI. All Sonar needs is to restore the size of text (and some graphical elements like note value buttons) in certain locations and give users control over some colors. I've been watching the factory color schemes closely. Theoretically, every screen element that is different between any 2 color schemes is a screen element where the user can be given control over its color. So far that would include the main program and view frames and backgrounds, various text and backgrounds such as track names, button text and highlights, and Browser text. Although our once proud order has been driven into hiding if not outright extinction, my fellow .STH Lords and I could do some cool schemes with only access to those colors. Control Bar buttons still have the same 4 states (inactive, rollover, pressed, active). One guess I have is that where each of those buttons used to require 5 different bitmap images, instead of images those are now the same image in 4 different colors. Given access to those colors, I could make schemes that would help the accessibility issues Sonar has for other people with vision problems.

Possibly in the sand or up my rear end, too much of the time.😆 I'm kind of a contrarian. When alarms are raised, my first impulse is to pee into the windstorm of overwhelming consensus. I'm glad I can apply critical thought to what I see, but I'm not glad about stepping on the toes of well-meaning people. Sincerely, thanks for taking the time and trouble to fill me/us in on more of the details. It's the kind of level-headed information I need to form a better opinion. I'm interested to see how the company responds, so please keep us posted. YouTube videos....well, there's always that "be sure to like and subscribe, and give us your opinion in the comments below" motivation for them to get attention by appealing to fear. If the title ends with an exclamation mark, they're already on the back foot with me. In my late teens I had the good/mis fortune to run across a book by Abbie Hoffman with an essay titled "Cold War Language: An Editorial Reply," that ruined TV news for me forever. It was like I got those glasses from They Live! Krazy Glued to my face. Here's a thought: in these days when the panic is usually about AI-created content, it's actually a tiny bit reassuring to think that a company would go to nefarious lengths to gain rights to use human-created content. If I hear of any friends using CapCut, I'll direct them to the warning sites. I never heard of them before today.

Not a product that I've heard of, maybe CoPilot could use something stronger than coffee.

The Elastique Pro algorithm is used in the clip stretching operations you mention, not sure if it's also used by Audio Snap. Elastique Pro is only one of the multiple algorithms Sonar users may choose in Preferences. Free tier users have to use one of the others for clip stretching. We'll still have our choice of stretching algorithms, just one fewer. Same with dithering, there are still multiple dithering algorithms to choose from, just not POW-R. IIRC, Elastique Pro is something that was added to Cakewalk by BandLab after its initial release, first 6mos. to a year after it came out. If you're concerned, you have a few weeks left to do audio testing of the algorithms to see if there's an audible difference. Given that the removal of individual color customizations in Sonar is one of the top complaints (along with smaller text), it may become more of a priority once CbB is no longer an option. The only way anything can become a higher priority is if the developers know that people want it, so please post in the Feedback forum if you have any complaints or suggestions. There are existing topics in that forum that you can bump or you can just make your own new topic. The developers don't read posts in the Deals forum unless they get notified that there's been a rules violation.

Ah, a new round of "panicky outrage/be sure to subscribe" videos. Has CapCut used anyone's content/likeness/whatever against their wishes or are they just waiting for the right moment to drive everyone away from their platform?

No it wasn't, unless you have an unusual notion of what constitutes a "band." It's a term that has been retroactively applied to a bunch of people who were active and in demand in a segment of the music industry around the same time. Most of whom dislike the term. They weren't all managed by the same person(s), they didn't get calls as a group. The Hall of Fame selected Ms. Kaye because her induction was likely to result in the most people visiting their museum/watching the induction ceremony broadcast. Same criterion they use for all inductees. She's a legit excellent player who's built her own brand. She's a woman, so, bonus. Also, still alive, which is becoming more unusual among 1960's session players. Fun fact: Carol isn't the first "member" of the "Wrecking Crew" to be inducted. In 2000, they added a category for "sidemen" and inducted Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer (also Scotty Moore, who contended that he and Bill Black and D.J. Fontana should have been inducted along with Elvis Presley in 1986). She's objecting to a practice that started 25 years ago and has already included people she played dates with, so....is she pissed because more "Wrecking Crew" people aren't being inducted, or is she pissed because it's taken them 25 years to induct her? Or is she a grumpy old lady who's losing her marbles?😄 The more I read, the more I'm leaning toward the grumpy/marbles explanation.

Oh is there now....

According to the documentation, the same techniques (swipe, select/Ctrl click) for healing unwanted splits are supposed to apply to MIDI clips as well as audio clips. As it stands now, the only way (that I know of) to eliminate unwanted splits in MIDI clips is Bounce to Clip, which is not as intuitive (esp. if you're used to working with audio clips). Moreover, if you're going by the manual, it's very frustrating for it to just fail to work. IIRC, a longtime SONAR user told me that it worked as recently as SONAR X. Can we get it back? If it's not possible, can the documentation reflect it?

While the BandLab Sounds are many (160,000?), varied in genre and useful for song construction, something that I would LOVE to see is a library of environmental sound effects. Water, wind, wildlife, transportation, city soundscapes, weather, etc. I know that such sounds are available from free sources such as the BBC library, but it would be great if BandLab had just one SFX loop pack among the 160,000. A pack of one hit "foley" sounds like handclaps, gunshots, crashes, splashes, laughs etc. would also be useful. Of course, if sound effects are already in there somewhere, please tell me how to find them and then the FR will be about making the Search function easier to navigate.😄 P.S. For the well-meaning and helpful, this is not a request for sources of sound effects. I know where I can find them, I just think it would be cool for there to be a BandLab pack or two of them.

I know it's not your bailiwick, but it would be nice if that wording were on that page. The reason I mention it is that I think that Sonar is a great option for people with older Windows systems and I wouldn't want them to be discouraged from using it. The minimum system I would expect to be able to run Sonar on successfully would be an i5/7 four core system with 8G of RAM and an SSD system/program drive. Although I built a CbB system that only had 4G of RAM and it didn't suffer too badly. I think that even with a healthy track count, such a system would do okay as long as you didn't expect to never have to do any freezing. AFAIK, Sonar itself doesn't require more horsepower than it did 10 years ago (I could be wrong). I think what's changed is our expectation of what's possible. Plug-ins use more resources and we use more of them. We expect everything to play back glitch free without having to freeze tracks. But does the DAW itself eat more cycles and use more RAM than it did 10 years ago? I think we just expect to be able to run 6 instances of Chromaphone with Neutron and Neoverb on every track, and Ozone on the Master bus.😄

My laptop has a 2-core i7 in it and runs Sonar just fine. Most of my projects consist of half a dozen virtual instrument tracks. I guess it's a good thing that my laptop can't read. A thing that I don't understand is why, if Sonar is more efficient than SONAR, the recommended system spec is higher for Sonar than it was for SONAR. 5 years ago, CbB ran fine on my old laptop with a 4 core i7 and 8G of RAM. 7 years ago, it ran fine on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 system. A couple of years ago, I set up CbB on a friend's Core 2 Duo 4G laptop. For all he wanted to do with it, record singer/guitar sketches, it worked just fine. Notably, the personal studio of Cakewalk developer Mark MacLeod is based around an i7 3770 system. 4 cores of Sandy Bridge goodness. The plug-ins I use have increased in both number and complexity in the past 10 years, and that's what's driven the upgrades I've made to my systems.

As you say, the actual separation is done by an engine on BandLab's server. It's probably the same stem separation engine as the BandLab DAW's use. Seems like Sonar could someday get whatever mechanism uploads the song and then downloads the separated stems. I did a test of stem separation among various DAW's I have that include the feature and the Next/BandLab did the best job, IIRC. I use stem separation for learning songs, doing my own version, etc.

It "supports" video to the extent that CbB does/did. Which is to say that you can play a video track that's sync'd to whatever audio track(s) you're working on. That's about it. To add to what others have said, Sonar's video function is useful in cases where the video part is already mostly complete and you want to record or edit audio to go along with it. That sounds like what you're trying to do. After I get the audio track together I export it from Sonar and import it to my video editor (Vegas Pro) for final rendering. Sonar can export video and audio together, but really, your NLE is going to give you more options for that. If you're making videos, you should have a video NLE with tools specific to that task. Horses for courses as they say, and there are a number of free (or nearly so, just wait for a MAGIX video production Humble Bundle and you can pick up 3 of them for about $30) video NLE's that are purpose built for the task. Some NLE's (like Vegas) are not bad at handling multi-track audio either. As for your issue with not being able to launch Video view although you can see thumbnails, that is indeed weird. I just tried it on my system and it worked fine. Video can be tricky because your system needs to have CODEC's capable of displaying whatever format you're trying to display. "MP4" is just a container format, there's a wide variety of video formats that can be within an MP4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AArch64 AFAIK the architecture is (so far) mostly found in mobile systems.

It was planned. Not indicating it in the chart was an oversight.

SONAR started supporting sidechaining a long time ago. According to Google AI, SONAR 7 was the version that introduced support for it. What version are you using? Surely not earlier than 7. It's dead simple to set up. You put the plug-in you want to control on the track that you want to duck, then create a send from the track that you want to do the controlling. I've never even had to tweak the send level for sidechaining. And of course if there's anything about it you have trouble with, those of us on the forum will have it covered pronto. Same. While I do think that learning to do it "manually" is of value to understand the principle behind EQ carving, there's no reason to struggle with doing it that way if better tools are available. Unless Trackspacer (and the other automagic tools like Neutron and MSpectralDynamics) suddenly vanishes, I think we're safe becoming dependent on it/them. As for the spectrum analyzer, like everything else Trackspacer, the display is very specific to what the plug-in does. It gives you a realtime visual of what the process is doing, and that's all. For general spectrum analysis, my needs are covered with MAnalyzer and SPAN, both free to use. MAnalyzer even shows you the exact frequencies of the peaks. Most parametric EQ plug-ins these days have pretty good spectrum analyzers.

I think to the developers, Sonar is Cakewalk by BandLab with an updated GUI and a change to the licensing model. It's the same codebase they've been maintaining for a very long time, so to them, CbB is just the last version of the DAW that used the bitmap GUI. Yes, they have announced that Cakewalk by BandLab will soon not be able to validate, but they have provided a free-to-use successor that works exactly like CbB and can freely open any Cakewalk project files. I understand the FUD, but if you step back a bit, BandLab has provided a free subscription DAW starting in early 2018 and continuing through today, uninterrupted. Their communication and the wording of the announcements could....use some improvement, but they're software engineers, not marketing people and they put it plainly: nothing is guaranteed. BandLab runs the Cakewalk group pretty lean, so that's how it is. But if you look at the behavior of the company, they have kept it free and continue to do so. They've always been free to pull the plug, it's just that recently they've been saying so more out loud. It's a free subscription. As such they are not able to promise that it will always be free, because BandLab is a big company and management could change. They could go out of business. The Cakewalk IP could once again be sold in liquidation. The future's not ours to see. My take on it is that if you have been comfortable for the past 7 years with using Cakewalk by BandLab under a free subscription, there's so far no reason to feel any less comfortable with using NuSonar via free subscription. Yes, OMG, BandLab could decide at any time to discontinue free access, but it was that way with CbB too. Attracting people by offering a free DAW and then yanking their access to it would be the dewshiest of dewsh moves, and so far, BandLab hasn't pulled too many of those. Yes, a lot of people, me included, were very disappointed when NuSonar was released to the payware world as a membership only product, but they still let people use CbB for free, and continued to do that until the arrival of a free-to-use version of NuSonar. Speaking of free tier Sonar, they've put some resources and effort into coming up with a way to have a free version and then implementing it. In the event that this should ever happen, I feel confident that users would get plenty of time to save their stuff off as audio stems and MIDI files or feed it to the converter program or however they would want to migrate to a different DAW. It'd be a pain in the asterisk, but no more so than moving to another DAW for any other reason. The only difference is when you do it. If you do it now, you're guaranteed the PITA right now. If you wait and see, the PITA might be years off, it might never even come. No matter what DAW is your main, I think it's good to have another DAW around and at least keep rudimentary skills up on it.

Impressive, I've never gotten as far as using automation to do this, my tools were/are static EQ and sidechained compression. I still do manual EQ carving and sidechaining, but they're no longer my main tools for trying to surgically create space. I've also used the EQ spectrum matching features of MAutoDynamicEQ (now on deep discount as part of MEssentialsFXBundle) and EQuivocate. Those allow you to take a static snapshot of a track's spectrum, then invert it to set the EQ's bands MAutoDynamicEQ is a dynamic equalizer, but it only has 8 bands (I believe). Neutron 4 has a similar mode built into it, and being iZotope, it requires less user intervention than those two. It works more like Trackspacer. MSpectralDynamics has a sidechain ducking feature, but it lacks the straightforward display. Trackspacer doesn't take a static snapshot, it continuously follows the sidechain input and ducks accordingly. It has 3 knobs. One each for low cut and high cut, to let you restrict the action of the plug-in to a narrower spectrum, and one for Amount, for how much ducking you're going to apply. The higher you crank the knob, the more space you give the sidechaining track, but the more you can hear the hole that it's making. It usually doesn't take that much to increase audibility. The ideal, really, you don't "hear" it until you switch it off. It also has a spectrum analyzer display front and center to let you see what it's doing. If you're getting into reducing frequency collisions and carving space, Trackspacer bypasses a lot of struggling and drudgery, IME. If it's piqued your interest, why not download it and demo it while it's on sale. It runs in a noise burst demo mode until you feed it a valid serial.

Imagine you were a utility infielder for 2 different teams throughout the 70's. In the 2020's, the Baseball Hall of Fame picks you, and you alone from the teams you played for to be inducted. Well, yeah, that's how the Baseball Hall of Fame works. It recognizes the achievements of individual players. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does too, except it expands on this to also allow for people to be inducted in small groups when their achievements were known by the name of the group. Ms. Kaye is being recognized for her individual achievements, something she's never had trouble with promoting in interviews. I have seen other session players of the era point out that Carol Kaye wasn't the only session bassist in Los Angeles in the 60's (of course they all seem to accuse each other of claiming gigs they didn't actually play on). What would she propose? How should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognize the achievements of deliberately anonymous session musicians? It's not the Hall of Skilled Performances That Contributed to Others' Success in a Variety of Musical Genres. Carol Kaye is as well-known as she is partly because she has actively built her own brand over the years. More power to her, she's a role model for female musicians and a symbol for the contributions of session players. She's sold a few method books too. But....quick, without the help of Google, name a single person other than actual band members who played bass on a Beach Boys recording. I'm a pretty big Beach Boys fan and I can't think of one name. Glen Campbell went out on the road with them on bass, but I don't recall if he also played bass on any of the records. People who care about fame start bands or solo acts. Session players make a living from playing music without the part where you have to ride around on buses without going home for weeks or months at a time, or answer the same 5 interview questions over and over, or get approached by fans and media when you'd prefer to just be going about your normal business, or have your personal life examined by a bunch of strangers.

"Screw you, Mattel!"

It's really just to be used in situations where there are frequency collisions. If your tracks don't have that problem to begin with, it's not going to do much. Maybe the program material you tried it on wasn't especially collision-y in the first place? It's also wonderfully transparent. One of the principles behind EQ carving is that you don't perceive the track being carved as missing anything because the presence of those frequencies in the other track's program material masks it. Trackspacer goes a step further and applies the cuts dynamically, so it's less noticeable. What you'd be listening for is only a perception that the vocal track is louder (even though it's not, it's just not being masked by another track). I sometimes have to pull the fader back a touch to bring things back into balance. P.S. Some Italian university students came up with a freeware plug-in called "The Masker" that claims to perform a similar task: https://audioplugins.lim.di.unimi.it/ I haven't compared them side by side on the same program material. I already have Trackspacer, and $29 (below my "party-size pizza" threshold) is cheap for what it does. One thing I noticed about The Masker's UI is that there are way more controls, which suggested to me that using it may require more dialing in. It also has a freeware "look" to it while Trackspacer's visual design is easier on the eyes. I'm glad The Masker wasn't around when I bought Trackspacer because my cheapskate ***** couldn't have resisted fiddling with it and I might not have gotten around to trying the processor I'm so happy with. There are plug-ins that are "industry standards" that when I've tried them, I could see instantly why they were industry standards. XLN's RC-20 is another one. RC-20's purpose is to make sonic material that's too clean sound more lo-fi, using the usual methods of adding vinyl crackle, wow, flutter, other noise, bitcrushing, etc. It's really a multieffect, and it doesn't do a single thing that I couldn't do using other plug-ins. But it's so focused on the task it's designed for that it's worth the price of a party-size pizza. Just in the speed with which I was able to get the results I wanted and could then move on to the next thing.